Swietlan Kraczyna

Early life

Swietlan Nicholas ("Nick") Kraczyna was born in 1940 to Russian parents in the town of Kamen-Kashirsky, Poland, near the Russian-Polish border. In 1945, while World War II was still going on, his family emigrated westward to flee the advancing Russian Army, and eventually settled in a Polish refugee camp in Western Germany at the end of the war. In 1951, the family was sponsored by an American church group to move to New Haven, CT, where Kraczyna completed his junior high and high school years.

In 1962, Kraczyna graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a B.F.A. in painting; in 1964 he earned an M.F.A. from Southern Illinois University. That same year, he and his wife Amy Luckenbach moved to Florence, Italy, where Kraczyna still lives. Amy, a successful puppet-maker and puppeteer, died of cancer in 2009.

Kraczyna became a master of multi-plate color etching in the early 1970s. His art reflects ancient themes and traditions of the Italian Renaissance often inspired by music, dance, mythology, and theater. The countryside of Tuscany which surrounds him daily, both in his primary home in the hills of Colleramole (just south of Florence), and in his secondary home in the hills of Barga (just north of Lucca), is also a frequent inspiration for his work.

Teaching graphic arts

Kraczyna has taught etching and printmaking in the United States, England, Italy, and the Czech Republic. In 1967, he moved his artistic focus from painting to the graphic arts and set up the first printmaking department at Villa Schifanoia's Rosary College Graduate School of Fine Arts in Fiesole (Florence), where he taught for 16 years. In 1970 he was one of ten artists to represent the United States at the Palazzo Strozzi Biennale di Grafica. In 1983, he co-founded, together with Maria Luigia Guaita and others, the Florentine International School of Advanced Printmaking 'Il Bisonte', where he taught until 1992. He taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Florence, from 1994 until the program's closure in spring 2016, and has been teaching at Syracuse University in Florence since 1998. Every summer, his workshop in multi-plate color etching in Barga, Italy, attracts students from all over the world: Japan, Korea, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Turkey, United States, England and Italy. Many of his students now teach in prestigious schools or have become well known as printmaking artists. Amongst them Sandro Bracchitta, Toni Pecoraro, Albert Puplampu, Andrea Serafini, Chesney Floyd, Maya Hardin, Gianfranco Pacini, Marco De Luca, Daphna Guttmann, Vincenzo Burlizzi, Erico Kito, Charley Goodby, Maureen Banker, Gary Lisa, Sun Jung Kim, Albert Beach, Zeynep Baransel, Patricia Alejandra Cordoba, Sandra Rigali, Katherin Godwin, Manuel Ortega, Silvia Papucci, Juan Esteban Sandoval, Makiko Ogata, Giovanni Greppi and Hubertine Heijermans, who is the eldest.

Marino Marini

From 1973 until 1980 Kraczyna worked as the technical assistant to the painter and sculptor Marino Marini on the complete series of his color etchings. During this time, Kraczyna worked extensively on adjusting the many colors used in the large-scale color etchings of the maestro while perfecting the personal technique he had developed in the medium. Kraczyna has lectured on and demonstrated his multi-plate color etching technique in universities and art schools in the United States, England, Italy, Mexico, Columbia and the Czech Republic.

Books and exhibits

Kraczyna is co-author of I Segni Incisi, the first Italian textbook on the history and comprehensive techniques of etching. In 1975 he published Dancing the Labyrinth: Multi-Plate Color Etchings 1975–1985 with an introduction by Corrado Bologna (Belforte Editore, Livorno, Italy). From 2007-2008, he was Artist in Residence at Syracuse University, New York, where he held an exhibit of multi-plate color etchings entitled "Icarus and Stravinsky" at the university museum gallery, as well as an exhibit entitled "Labyrinths" at the Point of Contact Gallery (Syracuse, NY) inside a complex structure of mirrors created around 25 drawings and etchings inspired by Borges' notion of the labyrinth. In 2003 Kraczyna held a large exhibit of his works entitled "Icarus: 40 Years of Flight" at the Fondazione Ricci, in Barga, Lucca, where Kraczyna illustrated and engraved in memory his graphic work from 1962–2002.

Publications

In 2006, in honor of the forty-year anniversary of the catastrophic flood of 1966, 83 of Kraczyna's photographs were published in the volume "The Great Flood of Florence: A Photographic Essay," including 10 photos for which Kraczyna was awarded the Fiorino d'Oro, the highest honor of merit bestowed upon a resident of Florence. 2011: The Marriage of Harlequin with an exhibit in Barga, and in 2012 an exhibit at the Bisonte Gallery in Florence.