On our Dahabeeya Abundance, we like to immerse our guests in beauty and style as they enjoy the luxury only a voyage on a dahabeeya can give.
One of the ways we love to do this is by displaying original artworks in our salon – we call it “Art on the River”. As a kind of private, floating gallery for only our guests to admire, we have different artists adding to the atmosphere of the Dahabeeya on a regular basis.
With our current artist, Katrina Vrebalovich, there is definitely a lovely breath of fresh air and inspiration blowing through our salon. The vivid abstract and semi-abstract scenes of her modern paintings bring life to the salon with their striking colours. Her works brighten up the neutral atmosphere there with their powerful expressiveness, drawing our gaze towards them inexorably.
Katrina’s work is special. Whilst painting, she seeks an inner connection to an aspect of Ancient Egypt and/or Nature, and then lets that energy flow through her hands as they create exquisite bursts of colour – in a similar way, the craftsmen of ancient Egypt asked their gods to breathe a part of their essence into their work, something they believed then to be a very real presence indeed. That is why gazing at Katrina’s vibrant work is an intrinsic experience: you cannot just glance at them, you feel them as you look – and then look again and deeper. As the colours and symbols move into your awareness, they transcend from mere images to the very essences of ancient Egyptian gods like Thoth, the God of Wisdom, the Moon and Writing, and Ma’at, the Goddess of Cosmic Truth and Balance. The two pieces representing Thoth and Ma’at now on display in our salon are fully abstract, but the feelings they evoke are anything but. They touch something inside each and every one of us, inviting us like Katrina’s undulating Nile Spirits to dive into an inner journey to a different reality that is in perfect harmony with our outer journey under sail on the Dahabeeya.
We can perhaps see this even more clearly in the semi-abstract works where images of a Nile Goddess and the sacred Lotus play a part. The ancients held true that the images they depicted on their walls were magical and could come to life when necessary. We can feel this in Katrina’s symbols as well – they hold a powerful life of their own, which transfers them right into the core of our very beings. The calm power of the Nile Goddess releases all our tensions as we gaze upon her, while the Lotus endows us with elegance and beauty. These paintings are truly powerful portals of colour that resonate exactly with the glory of Egypt’s nature and ancient culture that we get to admire on our dreamlike voyage down the Nile…
