"Wonderful instants", №7-8, 2002

Izabella Baikova's dreams
One of the findings of the Second All-Russian Festival of traditional and modern patch-work "Patch-Work Style 2002" was a striking, original phenomenon - a textile picture by Izabella Baikova.
The unconditional award of "Grand-Prix" of the Festival to her became a sensation. The artist who was the first to demonstrate the work in this sphere of applied art conquered everybody by the culture of drawing, the composition of colour solution and by delicacy, subtlety of original life perception.
The topical subject of the city sounded very specifically and unexpectedly here. The recognizable borders on unreal here, for it is the sign of dream, not of routine. Behind its seeming concrete nature is the state of being charmed, dormancy of what was captured.
We are being in front of a vision that gradually draws the spectator in its world.
The musical world of arches and vertical lines immerges us in the space of harmonious architecture and lovers, of smooth flap of bridges and pointed spires.
The river Moika is deserted on a summer night, and the theme of its pale harmony is repeated as a soft chord in the right, abstract part of the picture. People are sleeping in the dark, snow-clad city, only some warm windows are lit, and the vision dreams - the gorgeous birds and unicorns - fly away along the star-lit path, gradually melting in the iridescent sky. The delicate play of taffeta fabrics is the core of solution in another panel - "Wet Snow". The dark sky hangs over the evening street, the wind tears the umbrella out of the hands of a sole female figure, shrouding the image with a special atmosphere again, breaking the depicted substance off the surrounding world.
Panel "Rome" 3600x1400 mm.
A brief instant - and the night is already gone, while the morning is not yet in. The blending of the last moonlight and the first dawn rays. The Rome of the epoch of Renaissance against the background of the dying, vanishing ancient Rome. The artist intended to embroider an extract from Shakespeare's sonnet along the periphery of the arc:
"Those hours, that gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,
Will play the tyrants to the very same
And that unfair which fairly doth excel..."
Izabella Baikova's works are marked as well with special sincerity probably because they are not to order, they are a certain distraction, a rest for the artist who spent much of her time making stained-glass windows, executing monumental painting and design of interiors. It was I. Baikova's speciality after graduation of V.I. Mukhina Art School. A member of the Artists' Union, she worked a lot over stained-glass windows. She made such windows for the Catholic Church of Our Lady of Lourdes and undertook restoration of sculptures and the bas-relief in the same church.
However, the textile was not a casual phenomenon in Izabella Baikova's creative art. She is full of new intentions connected with the pagan world of Pro-Slavonic peoples.. their mythology perceived by the painter as something alive, internally concordant and comprehensible, and at the same time mysterious.

A.A. Stashkunas
The critic
St. Petersburg