“Sunrise in the coal region. / I went to school. / I went to work. / And on pay day, I went out and got drunk.” So wrote Jack Savitsky on the back of this deceptively cheerful work. A huge blazing sky compresses the scene below, a row of identical houses flanked by church and school and a line of figures marching dutifully to the day’s unchanging routine. Savitsky was born in Silver Creek (now New Philadelphia), Pennsylvania, to immigrant parents from Russia and Poland. His father worked in the rich anthracite mines, and for Savitsky life was difficult, dirty, and dangerous from an early age; he started work as a slate picker at the age of twelve and joined the miners soon thereafter. After years of labor in the region, he settled in Lansford, where he eventually found work in the No. 9 Coaldale Colliery. He saved enough money to purchase a red brick house, where he lived with his wife and their son. Over the course of thirty-two years underground he developed many ailments, including black lung and emphysema; when the mine closed in 1969, he retired. Savitsky always had an interest in art, but it was during his retirement that he seriously began to draw and paint.

Stacy C. Hollander, "Sunrise," exhibition label for Jubilation|Rumination: Life, Real and Imagined. Stacy C. Hollander, curator. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2012.