2013 Pianist and Woman in a Field Naive Folk Art Red and Green Encaustic and Oil on Canvas by Roman Zuzuk

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A pianist in a field plays a red upright piano, and its lid is built up in thick wax worked … Read more A pianist in a field plays a red upright piano, and its lid is built up in thick wax worked into a bed of roses. A long-haired woman arches over the instrument, and her hair pours across the hillside toward a village of orange roofs. A white rooster leans in to embrace the pianist, while small figures, a pig and a hen wander through the green foreground. The scene is a quiet fable told with humor rather than spectacle.

Roman Zuzuk was born in 1961 in Selec, Ukraine. He trained at the Simferopol Art School and the Kyiv Academy of Fine Arts, painted in Prague through the 1990s, and has lived in Toronto since 2000. His naive, folk-inflected figures are rooted in the village life of his childhood, and musicians and farm animals recur throughout his work. This painting is encaustic and oil on stretched canvas. The wax passages give real relief and sheen: the rose-incised piano lid and the combed strands of hair stand off the surface, while the sky and fields are painted thinly. It is signed and dated “Zuzuk 13” lower right.

The canvas measures 22.25 by 12.75 inches. It is offered unframed, as many of Zuzuk’s paintings are presented, and can hang or go into a floater frame. Photographs were white-balanced to a gray card under daylight-balanced lighting; colors may display slightly differently across screens. See less