Izabella Baikova

Take a plunge into Izabella’s eyes and you will see the cold steppes of Northern Russia, icy landscapes and winter skies. You will see strange characters earning straight out of the tales and legends they have been telling in Ural provinces since the beginning of time.

Between reverie and reality, her works are the waking dreams that fill up her nights because she does not sleep. She lives on the top floor of an old building in the centre of the prestigious town of St Petersburg and one of her pieces describes it exactly. However, on looking closer you discover strange little figures hidden inside the apartments. You can spot one of them through a window and, oh! there is one on the roof too. She lives inside a real world but her Imagination gets everywhere into her scenes. She plays with transparency, ice and frost. Nobody has ever rendered coldness so realistically with only a few pieces of fabric. Different materials placed on one another, sheers frosting parts of the pictures, the subtle piecing of shaded backgrounds to play on texture, what exceptional technical skills for a self taught quill artist! Granted, she is a Fine Arts graduate and you can see straight away that her pencil stroke is precise and perfect. Granted she is an experienced painter of monumental frescoes but still, her introduction to textiles 10 years ago, and her subsequent mastering of this medium is fantastic.

In her exhibitions, nobody can tell why they love her work and why it seems to cast a spell on them, but collectors from all over the world find themselves completely addicted to her style. Yes, her pictures are pieced, appliqued and not quilted but who eares? Yes, she uses fabrics like you and I but what she makes out of them, that is something else. Let yourself become transported on the journeys you can see through her blue eyes. They always seem to be somewhere else, beyond you, in icy landscapes where wolves can turn into beautiful princes with a frosted kiss...