25 Nikifor

Nikifor  (Никифор) (21 May 1895 – 10 October 1968), also known as Nikifor Krynicki, born as Epifaniy Drovnyak (Епіфаній Дровняк), was a Lemko naive painter. Nikifor painted over 40,000 pictures – on sheets of paper, pages of notebooks, cigarette cartons, and even on scraps of paper glued together. The topics of his art include self-portraits and panoramas of Krynica and Orthodox and Catholic churches. Underestimated for most of his life, in his late days he became famous as a naive painter.

Little is known of Nikifor's private life. For most of his life, he lived alone in extreme poverty in Krynica. He had difficulties speaking and was almost illiterate. His speech was unintelligible to most people. In 1930, his first paintings were discovered by Ukrainian painter Roman Turyn, who brought them to Paris. That gained Nikifor some fame. This did not, however, change his fate, as his art was still underestimated in Poland. 

In 1947 Nikifor was deported during Operation Wisla, where Ukrainian minorities were forcibly resettled by the communist regime to northern and western Poland, away from their ancestral homelands in the southeast. Three times he attempted to return and authorities allowed him to stay the third time.

This book is in Polish and English Languages

(Krynica - ukr. Криниця)