Belinda Balaski

About Belinda

Belinda Balaski, a native of Southern California, creates colorful watercolor and pastel paintings of people, landscapes, seascapes, flowers, and animals. She is especially fond of painting horses, influenced by her childhood on the racetrack with her father, the well-known jockey, Lester Balaski. Her work focuses on capturing the spirit and unique beauty of living creatures and the natural world.  She is motivated by the desire to share a spiritual sense of serenity and peace.

Belinda’s creativity expressed itself at a young age in acting, photography, and art.  When not performing in theatre, she was shooting pictures and drawing incessantly. At fourteen she won a four-year scholarship to the Minnesota Corresponding Art School, where she nurtured her affinity for representational art and learned many techniques that serve her well. 

 Belinda’s gift for acting took her on a different path. She won many awards and excelled in a 50-year career in Hollywood. She created BB’s Kids Acting School, where she taught, filmed, and nurtured thousands of children, all the while writing and producing original plays. These experiences developed her artistic eye for framing, beauty and editing a myriad of choices.

 Recently she retired from the film industry and closed her school, to return to her original pursuit of visual art. She enrolled in courses at Emeritus College, discovering a passion for watercolor and pastels. Drawing from a well of diverse talents and life experiences, Belinda uses her gift of capturing a feeling with an instinctual ease of composition.

Belinda lives and works in Southern California but spends several months a year on Kauai, her spiritual home, where many of her inspirational paintings are born.

Artist Statement

Tapping color into water is truly it's own kind of magic; simply called watercolor.

Belinda Balaski an LA/Kauai based artist who specializes in watercolor and pastels. She is forever seeking peace and spiritual tranquility in her work, drawn from a myriad of life experiences that have etched;  people, landscapes, seascapes, animals, faces, children, and a zillion more images inspired from these cellular memories, into her very soul. 

Working in water is like magic ~  when you finally tap a color in to the invisible water marks you lay, the magic begins as you tap darks for shadows, lights for highlights ~ trying to keep your values, just like in life. 

You can wet the whole paper, saturate it in water and sweep colors across to let them blend and mix at will. Let the water lead you, the colors, the mixes, the forms. You can try to control them, but wet on wet has its own life. 

Of course you can then let that dry and slice a hard line on top sending your blends into the background, defining your edges and sharpening ones focus into your subject. 

There is so much diversity in watercolors, one can only be limited by one’s own imagination. But if you are open to listening to the muse, tuning into the moment, the flow of the water can lead you where your imagination is endlessly open, allowing the kind of awesome creativity that real “Art” is truly made of. The kind of Art that takes you out of yourself and frees you of all limitations. This is her goal. To allow your eyes to rest on an image that will open and inspire your imagination beyond your physical world, allowing you to relate and yet freely fly...