My biggest inspiration and driving force in my work is a German Artist-Illustrator, named Sulamith Wulfing. I discovered her amazing work in 2002, and it has been the biggest influence in my creative development and establishment of my stylistic expression and direction. The minute I saw her work, I knew what I had to do with that seemingly unrelenting subconscious craving to make dolls. Discovering her, gave me a visual language to say everything I always knew I wanted to say with my work, but didn’t know how to say it. Her unique vision and technique, appeals and resonates so strongly with my own sensibilities that I don’t know where Sulamith Wulfing’s influence ends and my own vision begins. Sometimes I feel as if my dolls are composites of her paintings. And i think that perhaps that's what they are ment to be.
I can feel the influence and her aesthetic in every aspect of my work and try to emulate her visual language, but in a different medium, format and methods. It is my mission objective to capture the same magical, ethereal quality with my dolls, which she was so effectively able to convey with her work.
I consider Sulamith Wulfing's work to be pure genius. She is the Mozart of visual art. Looking at her drawings one can see the ease and freedom with which she drew, pulling the most beautiful images from her seemingly infinite imagination and putting them on paper in astounding detail and intricacy. She had a brilliant and unique mind and an original aesthetic in her work. It's as if her visions exist on a completely separate plane of perception and being, apart from all the familiar art influences and iconographic imagery that fills up the Louvre and the Uffizi art galleries. Although much art in those museums is quite important, it's all the same: an endless parade of similar-looking nudes, virgin Marys, plump women, Popes and Christs. It's as if all those supposedly great masters of Renaissance went to the same art school and studied from the same teacher and painted the same model. Sulamith Wulfing on the other hand created her own, completely unique and previously unseen visual style.
Sulamith Wulfing was very prolific, but much of her work was destroyed during WWll. Her books are very rare and expensive. I've been collecting them over the years, one at a time, and they are precious to me. If my house is ever on fire and i can only save one thing, I will take those books and everything else can burn, because the profound inspiration the provide me with, is priceless.
Even though Sulamith Wulfing's imagery provides a sort of foundation for my own Enchanted Doll aesthetic, I would like to believe that I'm somehow expanding and adapting her style to create my own, original and unique work. And I can only hope that to some people, my work will mean as much as Suamith Wulfing's work means to me. However, I feel as if my abilities and imaginative capacity pale in comparison to Sulamith's divne talent.