“I remembered a vivid visual impression I had carried with me from one of my earliest prisons,” wrote the artist Stefan Knapp about his time in a Siberian labor camp. “Through the crossbars of the narrow cell window, the sun appeared to be square. It was a different sun, the sun of captivity.”
Born in 1921 in the small country town of Bilgoraj in southeast Poland, Knapp was still a teenager when the war came.
Barred from education in Nazi Poland, Knapp and his family moved to a Soviet-occupied area so he could attend Lviv Technical Secondary School. It was here in 1940, that the young artist was arrested by Soviet soldiers.
Knapp would spend two years in Soviet prisons, witnessing the worst of humanity.
By the time World War II ended in 1945, Knapp had not only been released, but was flying Spitfire sorties for the British Royal Air Force. Though his memories of the war would torture him for the rest of his life, they would be the most influential in his art.
Art historian Maja Toczona-Wal explains, “War itself, as well as his experiences as a […] Spitfire pilot, not only had a huge effect on Knapp's artistic development, but also identified his trademark.”
Paintings of abstract shapes, intense color, and expressive lines dominated Knapp’s early career, but by the 1950s, he had coincidently discovered enamel and its possibilities.
After shattering a girlfriend’s antique brooch, a desperate Knapp was given access to a furnace and studio at the Royal College of Art in London, where he had been a student after the war. While experimenting with the enamel jewelry, he became fascinated by the medium and its science.
He quickly began pushing the material and working larger, developing a method for fusing enamel painting onto steel, which he would later patent.
“Steel panels would be cleaned, processed using acid, bathed in nickel solution and primed with a layer of porcelain,” Toczona-Wal describes. “He would then cover the ‘steel canvas’ with layers of enamel, each of the layers being fired [at over 1500-degrees Fahrenheit] in a specially designed furnace.”
Pouring enamel straight onto the surface, Knapp created abstracted forms and lines of vivid color. The works captured the aerial landscapes from memories as a pilot and offered some respite from his trauma as a prisoner.
