The Wagon-Driver.

“It was the modest and pious life sparked with traditional events which inspired him to paint.” Warsaw-born Karczmar (1903-82) spent much time in his youth with his grandfather in Dzieweniszky, a small Lithuanian shtetl with its “chatas” (dilapidated wooden houses), water carriers and horse-drawn wagons. To pay for his studies at the Warsaw School of Fine Art, Karczmar worked as a furrier. He continued his formal education at the Ecole de Beaux Arts and remained a furrier in Paris for twenty years, before emigrating to Safed, Israel in 1951. By 1955 Karczmar moved to Canada where he again worked in the fur trade until a debilitating eye problem interrupted his career. His wife Nadia encouraged him to return to his painting and the images of his youth in the shtetl then emerged in his art.