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Wycinanka: The Art of Polish Paper Cutouts
| Article
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20615 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1992 |
1,928 Words |
| Author
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Mark Wegierski
Mark Wegierski is a Toronto-based historian and freelance
writer/researcher who specializes in issues of nationality and
ethnicity in modern society. His articles have been published
in the Review of Metaphysics (Catholic University of America,
Washington, D.C.), This World (Elizabethtown College,
Pennsylvania), and other periodicals. |
I often have watched Irena Krawczyk at work. Now in her mid-seventies, she is one of North America's foremost practitioners of Poland's paper-cutting folk art, wycinanka. She learned her skill in the parish school of her home village near Warsaw, but her art has flourished since she immigrated to Canada in the early 1960s and found more free time, proper materials, and better working conditions. Nowadays, however, she suffers from diminished eyesight and chronic rheumatism, and her age is beginning to weaken her command of the painstaking techniques of paper cutting.
Over the years Mrs. Krawczyk has exhibited her cutouts and demonstrated her craft at ethnic festivals and other occasions across Ontario. She is proudest of the fact that her art is a craft form peculiar to Polish tradition. Known by various terms, wycinanka (pronounced vee-chee-nan-ka) is more properly called polska wycinanka ludowa (folkloric Polish paper cutouts); traditionally, it is made by peasant artists. Polska wycinanka artystyczna (pronounced ar-tiss-tich-na), meaning "artistic Polish paper outcuts," refers to wycinanka created either by paid skilled peasant artists or by professional urban artists. The term wycinanka refers to a single specimen of the form or to the form in general. The plural term, wycinanka, is used to refer to multiple examples of the craft. The more elegant French term decoupage is sometimes used.
It is possible to trace the development of wycinanka in the context of history and culture, both in Poland and in the centers of the Polish diaspora in North America, particularly Canada and southern Ontario. The presence of wycinanka can be seen as an affirmation and life-enhancing feature of a Polish community's identity. Yet although almost every Polish household around the world has an example of wycinanka somewhere on its walls, wycinanki are virtually unknown outside the Polish community.
A Painstaking Craft
Wycinanka, as practiced by a virtuoso of Mrs. Krawczyk's caliber, is detailed, painstaking, and time-consuming work. Wycinanki may be monochromatic or polychromatic. Multicolored wycinanki are achieved by layering cutout designs, which may be symmetrical, asymmetrical, complex or asymmetrical representations of people.
Symmetrical wycinanki are cut according to some repeating pattern when the paper has been folded in half, or in quarters. The typical symmetrical wycinanka is either a circular "wheel" or a representation of a plant cut
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