Baba Yaga: The Forbidden Oracle
THIRD PIECE of Series III • MYTHOS: UNITED
Neither hero nor villain, Baba Yaga is a walking paradox. A figure carved from ash and prophecy, wisdom and rage. In this painting, she wasn’t created. She emerged—dragging her own myth behind her.
The surface glows with Burnt Amberina and ember-stained brown—like scorched wood, like a forest set aflame and frozen in memory. As if memory itself had caught fire and cooled into color. It radiates both warmth and warning. At first glance, it feels familiar. Ancient. Then it turns on you.
The lower section, where the charcoal black crackle spreads like ancient veins of shattered obsidian, hides a truth far older than logic: that wisdom is not born of light, but of surviving the dark. Each fissure feels like something sacred broke here. And it did. They are fractures in the psyche. They echo every moment when instinct broke through logic, when fury eclipsed reason, when survival devoured innocence. Each line a remnant of the sacred chaos we carry.
Look closer… Closer: the area of fragmentation is no accident. It unfolds precisely across the sacred ratio—1.618. The divine proportion, YES. But in Baba Yaga’s world, the Golden Ratio doesn’t represent harmony—it represents cost. Sacrifice. Initiation. A revered geometry that doesn’t soothe, It awakens. It demands. In the hands of the witch, math is not calculation. It is spellcraft directed to the unconscious.
The black is not absence; it’s ORIGIN. And what bleeds through is not fire—it’s the memory of fire. The lower surface breathes like a bed of glowing coals waiting for oxygen, in the form of wisdom that is won through burning.
And then, out of nowhere, a small, glowing orange streak. Unassuming. Isolated. But it pulls. It pierces. A focal point so minor and yet so major, so defiant. This is no accident. It is the spark that refused to die. The child she lost. The price she paid. The ember of grief, preserved in ritual, unforgotten. Is the curse that became a memory.
Above it, a graffiti stroke in toxic green erupts downward, like venom dripping… like cursed sap from a tree that speaks in dreams. It is Baba Yaga’s mark—not a signature, but a scar. A stain of power, untamed and unrepentant. Is not make to impress, but to unsettle.
The brown impasto feels archeological, like something dug up from beneath the ruins of history. The textures are narrative. The story of a woman feared not because she was wicked—but because she was never controllable.
Nothing here is symmetrical. And yet everything is wildly balanced like a soul at war with itself.
Baba Yaga dwells in the shadows we pretend we don’t have.
This painting is not a mirror of who you are. It is the smoke of who you deny being.
She is every instinct we suppress. Every sacred contradiction we refuse to reconcile.
Her question for you is:
Do you dare to walk deeper into her forest… or do you run and pretend you didn’t see the smoke?