The hand-made, hand-painted Christmas globes signed by artist Viorica Serbanoiu tell a story, keep traditions alive, and can be compared to a journey through time, back to a childhood with sleighs and snowmen.

Viorica Serbanoiu is one of the self-made artists who never took art classes. In 2014, driven by the desire to find an escape from an unfortunate situation, she began to draw on different supports while getting inspired by life, traditions and the surrounding environment. Since then, she has also been paintings on glass globes, fairytale globes as they were called, with traditional themes that bring back to light moments and memories from childhood.

“Since the winter of 2015, I have tried to translate all the moments of my childhood related to the winter holidays onto the globes. I called them fairytale globes because they have traditional scenes, children playing, idyllic landscapes,” Viorica Serbanoiu told AGERPRES.

After they are painted, the hand-made globes arrive at the customers’ homes directly from the artist’s workshop. They are made of a special, particularly fragile glass, which is why they require extra care.

“The globes that I paint are one hundred percent hand-made, blown by a glassmaker, Tibor Fuleki, in a village in Cluj County. I order them transparent, precisely so that I’ll be the only one to put colour on them. The surface that I have available for painting is quite small and there are always a lot of shapes that I want to place on that surface. I like to get inspired by popular traditions and customs, motifs such as the round dance, the flower of life, the sun, the spiral of time, the tree of life,” said Viorica Serbanoiu.

For the artist, the hand-painted globes have a touch of originality and more easily convey the spirit of Christmas when they are placed in the tree and lit by installations. I remember the celebrations of another time and the joys that the children shared with their families.

From 2015 until now, Viorica Serbanoiu has painted more than 500 globes, most of which have remained in the country, but others have crossed the borders, reaching clients from UK, Ireland, Spain, Canada or the United States of America.