CHISINAU, Moldova—It’s not every day a politician becomes a diplomat, and then after only a year decides to switch careers entirely and reinvent herself as an internationally acclaimed artist.

But that’s exactly the path Cristina Balan has chosen, and she doesn’t regret it for a minute.

From June 2018 until July 2019, Balan represented the former Soviet republic of Moldova as ambassador to the United States. Yet for all the glamour and prestige of Embassy Row, it just didn’t speak to her in the way art did—and so she gave it all up and returned to Moldova.

Balan, 48, reflected on her life over dinner with this reporter last month in Chișinău, the capital of this poor Eastern European country wedged in between Romania and Ukraine.

“As a child, I was always telling people I wanted to be an artist. So when I was 5, my mother took me to a professional painter and she gave me lessons,” she told The Diplomat. “Then I went to art school and studied there for four years, and then my idea was to continue my studies at the St. Petersburg Academy of Art. But then the Soviet Union collapsed, and my mom warned me, ‘if you continue in this path as an artist, you won’t be able to support yourself.’”

Balan, who excelled in math, put down her paint brush and went on to earn a degree in business management. That led to consulting jobs for multinational firms and eventually to politics, and before long, she became deputy president of the ruling Democratic Party of Moldova (PDM), a strongly pro-European movement.

In 2017, she was named Top Female Politician of the Year; the following year, she was sent to Washington as the first woman ever to represent Moldova as ambassador there.

“For 20 years, I didn’t paint. I was totally blocked,” Balan recalled. “Then I started up again in Washington, where everything closes on Friday night and the city’s empty. I decided to use the weekends to paint. People encouraged me to follow my dreams.”

Balan was a political appointee, and when the DPM lost elections the following year, her tenure as ambassador ended abruptly.

“When I came back to Moldova, I had several job offers to continue—either in politics or in business—but I refused,” she said. “I wanted to give myself a chance to pursue this dream.”

For the next two years, a period that coincided with the COVID lockdown, Balan quietly took art classes online.

“I didn’t show anything to anyone,” she said. “I developed my own techniques through trial and error. It’s always important to be unique, to have your own voice and style. Otherwise, you’re just someone else’s student, and I don’t like this idea.”

Balan uses oil and acrylic on canvas, sometimes adding molding paste for texture. In recent years, Balan has exhibited her work locally in Chișinău, as well as at group art shows in Bucharest, Kyiv, New York and Washington.

But now, Balan is taking her art to the next level, and mounting her first solo art exhibit outside Moldova.

“A Tribute to Madonna: Solstice of the Divine Feminine” will run June 19 to July 3 at the Art Nou 277 gallery in Barcelona, Spain. The exhibit consists of 12 paintings that—as the title implies—coincides with the summer solstice and honors the Madonna.

Balan said the paintings were inspired by a visit to the world-famous Santa María de Montserrat, a Benedictine abbey in the mountains northwest of Barcelona. Among the monastery’s many attractions is its sacred Black Madonna—known as “La Moreneta”—which dates to the 12th century and is said to have healing powers.

“I am not a religious person, but I am spiritual. I embrace all religions,” Balan said, adding that she’s been working on this exhibit for more than three years. “Here I make her universal, that’s why I call it the divine feminine.”

The dozen paintings in Balan’s exhibit—with names like Immaculada, Mother of Creation, Mona, Golden Heart and Dancing Venus—employ abstract spirals and vortexes inspired by the mathematical Fibonacci sequence. Italian art critic Francesco Caprioli calls her style “a pure sense of divine that radiates the spirit and spreads into nature.”

Writes Caprioli: “The optical and circular illusion of Balan’s works envelops us and forces our mind to rotate in a perennial and universal motion; it generates a centripetal movement which is also an illusion, an illusion of reality, true, great, unresolved anxiety of the contemporary world.”

Balan said her first painting from the original sketches, Mother of Creation, was immediately sold to a US buyer. The money from that sale, along with others, has been used to finance art classes for Ukrainian women who have lost their husbands in the ongoing war with Russia.

As an abstract artist, Balan says her goal is to use shapes and colors to evoke reactions, emotions, ideas and impressions without depicting anything recognizable. That’s why her paintings aren’t meant only to be seen or analyzed, but felt deeply.

“Art uplifts humanity, and that is my contribution to the world. I aspire to make the invisible visible, to open the human heart, and awaken feelings deep inside all of us,” Balan wrote in a recent blog post. “Although I am seen as an abstract artist, each of my works is unique, born of pure inspiration and of my intention to help transform the world.”