It's not often you meet someone who literally lives in a world of their own imagination, but that's what makes artist Claudia Rubinstein such an endearing character.
Wearing a feathered, tiara-like headdress, and sparking cats-eye glasses, the softly spoken former nurse, who moved to Australia from Canada in 1986, radiates all the whimsy and angelic grace of a mythical fairy godmother from one of her imagined worlds.
"I've been drawing and painting since I was a little girl," reflects the artist, who has German heritage.
She remembers how she would create living spaces for her dolls, using toothpaste caps as tea sets.
"I love miniature worlds, little animals and anthropomorphic states and a lot my inspiration has come from the stories I heard as a young child."
Listening to the Brothers Grimm fairytales, read by Danny Kaye on her LP player as a child, she relished in the voices and vivid descriptions.
"It just took me into the wonderful world of the imagination. I love to think of little mice wearing jackets and frogs wearing suits and that sort of thing," she says.
She was a featured artist at last year's Fish Creek Children's Festival of Stories, and Rubinstein returns to the town in Victoria's South Gippsland this autumn with two events: a maritime edition of her Claudia's Imaginarium exhibition and a Mad Hatter's Tea Party event.
Worlds of fantasy
Once described as "Graeme Base on steroids", Rubinstein has accumulated a vast back catalogue of vibrant sketches, oil, acrylic and watercolour paintings, 3D polymer clay pieces, sculptures, and jewellery, bead and textile pieces over her lifetime.
Growing up on an acreage property in Canada, she was inspired by the mystical labyrinths of nature, imagining stories about the swamp frogs, tadpoles, birch trees, lichen, moss and mushrooms in the forest.
It was a lexicon that she would later carry into her own artwork, where magical creatures, fairies, frogs, snails, toadstools and jewelled ornaments co-exist in surreal and satirical narrative vignettes.
From married frogs eating jewelled insects for lunch, to a bird and an owl playing chess together, her quaint scenarios carry all the absurdity and charm of an Alice in Wonderland or Wind in the Willows anecdote.
Embracing the lyrical wit of late 19th and early 20th century English children's authors, Rubinstein even writes accompanying poetry, songs and fables for some of her characters.
Her elaborate jewelled and beaded teapots and luminous polymer jellyfish lamps exemplify a unique talent for transforming the most inanimate of objects and unremarkable of creatures into sentient, sacred beings.
"There's something very lyrical about a jellyfish underwater, that lovely undulation as the tentacles of the jellyfish come up and come down again, that pulsing, breathing, ballet movement that happens under the water," she says.
"It's the same thing with a snail, the snail moves so slowly and it's absolutely mesmerising."
An Aladdin's cave
Having remained largely anonymous and reclusive from the art world and the public eye, Rubinstein's work stays permanently on private display at her 128-year-old home that she shares with her husband in Hawthorn.
An Aladdin's cave of trinkets, treasures and floor-to-ceiling art, there are three bohemian boudoir studios; one for painting, one for beading and one for polymer clay and sculpture.
"People say it's more like a museum than a home, the walls are different colours and there is art from top to toe, sculptures and garden pieces," Rubinstein says.
"It's a real cornucopia of colour and form all throughout, with fantastical images and imaginary pieces, jellyfish chandeliers and jellyfish lights."
With clutter crowding every mantle piece, cabinet and side table surface, Rubinstein's ornaments, books and pictures are typically colour coded in tones of gold, crimson, pink, green and aquamarine.
On entering the home, the entrance hallway boasts a pastiche of floor-to-ceiling gilded portraits.
Channelling the Palace of Versailles, the regal grandeur extends to the ornate guest bedroom, where a gilded bed fit for a French queen is immersed in a deep, dark forest mural.
With paintings extending into the high ceilings, chandeliers, mosaics, mirrors and pot plants framing antique chaise lounges, it's hard not to be overwhelmed by Rubinstein's opulent aesthetic.
Even the bathroom references a Garden of Eden, with a vertical garden feature wall in the open shower tub providing a satirical backdrop for the next showering Adam or Eve.
"My house is full of all my memories, my treasures, my experiences, my creations," Rubinstein says.
Taking pride of the art of staging her treasures, she finds much joy in taking the odd, unsuspecting taxi driver, tradesman or curious stranger that she meets up the street on a royal tour.
The power of a vivid imagination
Behind the illusion of a seemingly carefree lifestyle governed by whim of fantasy and creativity, Rubinstein's life has not been without challenges.
Having lost her youngest son to suicide a few years ago, and now living with the debilitating effects of onset Parkinson's disease, she finds great comfort in the mediative and therapeutic benefits of creativity.
"The thing about the imagination is it gives everyone a safe place to reside, it's a place for hope, a place for peace, a place for dreams," she says.
"The other day I had to have an MRI, and while I was in the machine, they continually kept asking me, 'Are you OK?'
"I was absolutely fine, I was off in a painting that I was creating and thinking about what I would do when I got home."
Often finding herself making polymer teapots into the early hours, she says that having a vivid imagination can be an all-consuming, manic and even addictive affair, often interfering with her sleep patterns.
But the empowering aspects of creating something from nothing, and being able to shift one's mindset and energy, are ultimately life-affirming.
"People talk about manifesting, thinking about something, then seeing it clearly, then it will occur — well that's exactly what happens in the creative process," she says.
"The imagination is very powerful. I'm very grateful I've been gifted with one — I've been very fortunate."
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Inside the home of artist Claudia Rubinstein, an Aladdin's cave of trinkets and treasures - ABC News
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