János Krizsán was the member of an old family from Nagybánya. His meditative art was evolving slowly. His father forced him to take a job at the treasury of the mine. Nevertheless, the art colony that settled in the town had such an influence on him, that he left his job threatening his father with suicide. Beginning with 1902, he attended the free art school as a pupil of István Réti and Béla Iványi Grünwald. With the help of the scholarship, he received from the town of Nagybánya; he attended a private school in Munich between 1906 and 1907. His individual work began in 1909. He presented urban landscapes and motifs from the immediate surrounding of the town on the jubilary exhibition of the colony in 1912. He was elected a member of the NPA (Nagybánya Painter's Association) in 1922. As an artist living at the colony, he took part in the reorganizing work after the World War. After the resignation of János Thorma, he accepted to be a teacher of the art school together with András Mikola. He was a convinced adherent and follower of the traditions.

His paintings are more suggestive and deep, than the works of his colleagues, who followed the traditional path. He never needed to get familiar with the surroundings first because this was his home, his natural environment from his birth on. He was the one who loved and felt most deeply the nature and the atmosphere of the local motifs. His childhood memories must have played a great role in this. "He grew up surrounded by mountains, - tells István Réti - in the neighbourhood of narrow valleys climbing up the hills, where small dispersed houses follow the lines of the roads and the curves of the valleys. Most of his colleagues arrived to the feet of the painterly Mountains from a plain region, therefore saw and painted them from a flat foreground. The most favourite themes of János Krizsán lived inside the curving valleys or on the top of the mountain and the leafy hillside." (István Réti: The painterly Art Colony. Budapest, 1954)

Apart from his winter landscapes, he doesn't convey the radiating sunlight. The view, seen from a well-chosen perspective is dominated by gloomy and gray tones. In spite of the fact that he rejected the rebels of the colony, some of his paintings show that he instinctively felt the essence of their innovation. In these cases he left the depicting naturalism and chose concentrating and decorative painterly devices.