Witchcraft - Flaming hair

Christa Shelbaia burned for art, and for many years her fiery red hair stood like a banner for her life, her emotions, and her creative work as an independent artist. Unafraid of the uncomfortable or the inaccessible, her work resists easy categorization – the right drawer has yet to be built. Unconcerned with appeal or convention, her oeuvre continues to elude simple classification to this day.

Her paintings in particular bear a distinctive signature – unafraid of the figurative, yet always transforming it into something poetic. Her visual worlds were suffused with mythic undertones, inhabited by figures that seemed to have stepped out of ancient tales, and yet belonged to none. She did not paint stories – she summoned atmospheres: dense, figure-filled scenes that opened glimpses into something deeper, something that refuses to be named.

I send her a quiet greeting across the Styx – the river of forgetting.

To the graphs above: The original photographs for my graphic interpretation were taken in 2002

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