“The landscape in which we look for our place
is immobile, it isn`t the background,
it isn`t the background we should have had,
although, nothing goes on differently,
from what we have expected,
only as if everything was a bit
louder than needed,
the tremors of the window panes,
the teeth-grindings of the walls ,
the patient stirrings of the roof tiles,
and the fear that here we won`t even have a word.”
Denes Krusovszky
From the Lexicon:
„Autodidact is a word that comes from the Greek (literally:”self taught”) meaning: such a person who acquired certain knowledge without school, by his\ her own power. The autodidact usually has more self motivation and self developing willpower.
Famous autodidacts randomly: Csontváry, LajosTihanyi, Lajos Kassák, Ivan Mándy, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Van Gogh, Goethe, John Cage, Tadao Ando, Schönberg…” And now ceremoniously we add the name of Éva Krajcsovics.
What does this definition cover in our case? Éva Krajcsovics has never attended „professional education” at the Academy of Fine Arts (university lately): having finished a window- dresser school, she joined the Fine Arts Group of the Railway, where she tried to acquire the basic rules for painting, Gyorgy Kling had helped her in it for many years.
It would be worthwhile once to contemplate on what have Éva Krajcsovics and numerous notable colleagues of hers missed out on not attending the Academy, they arrived at professional level in a much harder way, they became equal partners of those colleagues who already in their twenties had in their Identity Card written fine artist for occupation, and member of the Art Foundation
Did they miss out on the regular corrections and making it harder, the yearly evaluation of their progress graded? I do not think that these aids and trials would primarily help shape the prospective artist`s personality; if he\she had good luck, he\she had found a master who with giving advice could help just as much to survive the first years or rather the first decade, and could offer consolation at times of blocks and desperations,
The most important what the autodidacts miss out on, and without which it is really much harder, is perhaps the community; that year after year they spend most of their waking hours with people who are exactly in the same shoes as them. Looking over by the easel next to them in the atelier, seeing whether they are experimenting with the same or similar nonsense, so as to finally differentiate the good- student- study from the PICTURE. That the others with the same confusion in their eyes try to find the voice which they will think to call of their own…
Éva Krajcsovics walked this path on her own, and today I can unwaveringly declare that she had won. Because (surely at the cost of lots and lots of sacrifices) she has retained some unquestionable toughness of the lonely, and the acceptation as natural to start over again a hundred times .
I would risk, if you do not misunderstand, that she has also retained some anarchic amateur streaks from the hardest years: as she did not have the routine of those painters who had become too soon professional, who realised in time or believed to have realised that – let us say- it is not worth setting out “north-east”, in that direction that so many have got the worse of…
Krajcsovics has till today retained the clarity and naivety of her sight, for her, whichever way she looks it is terra incognita, fatal adventures may await her in the neighbouring pantry, amongst the books forgotten on the table or at the foot of her mother`s home which has by now become sacral.
Let us make it clear. It was not a heroic choice of Krajcsovics to choose the harder way, she had no other chance. She has emerged from such poverty where the possibility of 5-6 “leisurely student years” was no question at all: she had to go to work, and she devoted her free time and energy left to painting.
It is easy and romantic to write this sentence like this, but looking into it is much harder.
What was this determination, stubbornness which helped her never to give up?
She learned it well in advance, what every creative person learns, that experience will not take her very far: with every single work she has to start from the beginning…That we always start from zero..
Naturally, technically she learned a lot – such as- painting with oil it is forbidden to apply glaze on the thick ,still wet layer of paint, because the picture will be sticky even twenty years later, or with aquarelle you must not economise on paper, the good quality embossed paper ensures a thousand times more freedom for making changes…
However, the fatal path (what pathetic word!), where, due to some miracle, the many brush strokes take shape as a picture, nobody can avoid. Routine does not help here, only the harsh discipline attributed against oneself.
Krajcsovics was with unshakable conviction stubbornly building her pictures, creating her own voice, step by step, of which the result you can see here.
Her art of painting does not belong to the easily digested, quick success bringing pieces consumed by a wide range of people! Her art is of an incredible fine, intimate, contemplating kind. The so often recalled minimal, the least tools to use to get to the core, for which there are no words, this being typical of every piece of her works. Those who take the trouble, and are prepared to forget everything that would influence their identification with the pictures, those who are able to take the journey, which the artist had taken, “backward”, will come out winning. They will find certainty in uncertainty, consolation in desolation. Perhaps for a flash he\she will find that clear voice that he\she has always been looking for,… what we are looking for..
Ottó Tolnai has written not long ago: I am sitting on my chair and looking at a picture still from that direction of the wardrobe and making some notes of this and that in my notebook. At home I look at what is it that I have made notes of:” There is some violet surface shining through, ready to draw back at the same time , so as a new grey (new positive grey) space should coat on it. I do not understand. I only sense that something similar is happening when God, in nature, is moving his sandpaper-like coulisses, which are sometimes misty and sometimes clean bright…”
Dear friends, I humbly tip my imaginative hat in front of Eva Krajcsovics professional and personal quality. I launch the exhibition.
Budapest, 5th August 2015
Erzsébet Vojnich