In 1996, an artist from Odessa (Ukraine) Svetlana Telets painted a picture depicting a sad, pale woman in a strange black headdress, standing in the rain.
Svetlana sold this picture several times, but each time picture was soon returned back due to the fact that strange phenomena began in the house of buyers.
Svetlana Telets is an artist specializing in surreal and abstract art. She was born in 1973 in Odessa and studied at the Odessa Grekov Art College. She has participated in numerous art exhibitions and received several awards for her work.
According to Svetlana, six months before she created the infamous “Woman in the Rain”, she had a constant eerie feeling that someone was watching her closely. But she brushed it aside and went about her business.
One bright sunny day, she sat down in front of a blank canvas, contemplating what to paint. Suddenly, the image of a woman appeared in her mind, clear as day – her face, colors and shades. “It was like magic!,” she said.
Svetlana painted the bulk of the painting in five hours, as if someone was guiding her hand. And then she spent a whole month refining it until she felt the painting was complete.
Then Svetlana came to Vinnitsa, where the art salon was located, and exhibited “Rain Woman” there. The paintings immediately attracted the attention of local art lovers as well as buyers.
The first buyer of “Rain Woman” was a business woman living alone. She hung the painting in her bedroom, but soon regretted it.
She felt like someone was watching her, and she couldn’t sleep at night, even after she took the picture off the wall.
“Please take it away. I can’t sleep. It seems that there is someone else in the apartment besides me. I even took it off the wall, hid it behind the closet, but still I can’t,” she said, calling the artist on the phone.
The second buyer, a young man, thought the painting would look great in his living room. But soon he also regretted his decision and returned it back to the artist. He was willing to pay half the purchase price just to get rid of the painting.
He claimed that the woman in the painting haunted him, appearing to him every night (in dreams or waking, not specified) and following him like a shadow.
A third customer was interested in “Rain Woman” because he thought she was “pretty nice”. He was not even scared away by the words that the painting had previously been returned due to some anomalies and that the locals had already developed a bad reputation around it.
But very soon he realized that buying the painting was a big mistake. According to him, the white eyes of the woman in the picture seemed to follow him everywhere, and it seemed to him that he was drowning in them.
In the end, he returned the painting to the salon.
“At first I didn’t notice what white eyes she had. And then they began to appear everywhere. Headaches began, unreasonable unrest,” he said.
Svetlana herself says that each picture is created for a specific person, and that somewhere, there is probably someone for whom her “Rain Woman” was painted and who will not be disturbed by it.
One of the journalists asked about the “cursed” painting of Archpriest Vitaly Goloskevich, Candidate of Theological Sciences and priest of the Transfiguration Cathedral in Vinnitsa.
“A person has a spirit and a soul. There are truly spiritual works of art, but there are soulful ones. And the picture you are talking about represents precisely such spiritual art. And it does not come from God. There is such a thing – aftertaste,“ Vitaly said.
“Before buying a painting, I would advise you to listen to yourself, to your feelings that remain after contemplating the creation. The artist puts into the work the mood in which he was at the time of his writing. And it is not known who led the artist at that moment.
“Therefore, if it was something unclean, then even the consecration of the picture will not help.“
The last articles about this picture appeared in the Ukrainian media in the mid-2000s, and what is now with this picture is unknown. At that time, the painting “Rain Woman” stood without a frame in the same salon in Vinnitsa and cost $500.
