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János Krizsán was interested mainly in the surroundings of Nagybánya and the painting of landscapes. He identified himself with the spirituality of the founders of the colony. Nevertheless his landscapes are not full of light. He presents the chosen view in a shady, greyish tone.
When painting a winterscape it was quite common to choose a theme that is bathing in the light reflected from the snow. But János Krizsán was not interested in something like that. His Village in Winter is dominated by doom. The painter has built his composition on the dark tones of blue. The white fields of colour do not lighten the oppressing atmosphere, because the artist used some greyish nuances of white. The shriveled tree, which is dominating the foreground, accentuates the barrenness of the surroundings. The houses that are hiding in the valley seem insignificantly small between the huge tree of the foreground and the large hills of the background.
As he grew up in Nagybánya, his paintings are a bit more suggestive, than those of his companions following the traditional way. He never needed to get acquainted with the surroundings before painting, because this was a home, the natural scene of his life not just a theme for him. "He grew up beside mountains - István Réti wrote about him -, beside the view of small valleys going up to hills, where scattered houses follow the roads and the turns of the valleys. Most of his colleagues arrived from plans to the hills of Nagybánya, so they were viewing them from the plain foreground. The favourite themes of Krizsán were living inside the turning valleys or on the top of the hill and the leafy hillsides."(The colony of Nagybánya. Bp. 1954)
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