Maidens & Love

Rating:
Summary: Hauntingly beautiful and evocative.
Review: This slim little volume contains some of the loveliest of Sulamith Wulfing's ethereal paintings. I also own "Fairy Tales" and have seen "Motherhood," but this one remains my favorite.

~About The Art~

Wulfing's delicate and exquisitely colored artwork can give an initial impression of children's-book illustration (and I believe some of it was), with little to recommend it beyond mere decorative prettiness; but these subtly sensual, often eerie or even disturbing images tend to linger in the memory in a way that is difficult to explain.

Let me stress that I'm not ordinarily a fan of "juvenile art" or even art depicting children, as the genre mostly tends towards a tiresome and vapid sweetness, but Wulfing's work is something altogether different. For all its fanciful or fairy-tale subject matter, it can strike an occasional note of unsettling strangeness, producing that peculiar shiver at the sight of innocence just brushed by a breath of darkness.

For me, her work has the quality of some evocative half-forgotten dream with a message of mysterious personal importance. It's small wonder that Stevie Nicks credited the inspiration for many of her songs to the work of Sulamith Wulfing; it's ideal meditation material for calling forth the fey muses from the cobwebby attic or thorny forest of your imagination.

~About the Book~

There are 26 color pictures in all. Each work of art fills the righthand page, while a classic love quote (Tennyson, Shelley, Wordsworth, etc.) is printed on the page to the left. The original titles (in English, anyway) of the paintings are as follows:

Aureole ~ Prayer ~ Gesture ~ In the Temple ~ Golden Flower ~ Saint and her Jester ~ Hour of Visions ~ The Chosen One ~ White Rose ~ Nocturnal Butterflies ~ Flush of Youth ~ First Butterfly ~ Alone ~ Crown ~ To Meet Another ~ Found ~ Flame ~ Ornament ~ Before the Candlestick ~ Song of Love ~ Expectancy ~ Veil ~ Underground ~ Big Moon ~ Flower of Youth ~ Betrothed

One of my favorites is "Veil:" A fair girl with big melancholy eyes and a fantastically, intricately patterned dress sits on a throne in a curtained room, a wreath of large flowers on her head, a sheer white veil flowing down on either side of her. There is a candle on each arm of the throne, the one to her right burned out, the one to her left still lit, with an elongated flame; both strangely shaped by the halted streams of melted wax... How long has she been waiting there, and why?

Another favorite is "Big Moon," truly a species of eldritch erotica: a large full moon makes a pale-rosy-golden circle of light behind a bank of wildflowers, while a slender blond maiden lies half-reclined on the ground, her eyes closed, her long hands in her lap, her gown slipping down her shoulders to leave her small breasts bare. A tiny mouse wearing a crown sits next to her, playing the panpipes.

Obviously I recommend this book. I only wish that more of Sulamith Wulfing's artwork was available in print form, or that larger and more complete books would be published with collections of her paintings.