Somewhere towards the end of a very special year, I suddenly felt a very strong urge to pull out some old fairytales and read them again. The one that always stood out for me is the Story of “The Little Red Riding Hood” — probably because since I remember I have been an anxious child, afraid of pretty much everything.
As many others, triggered by the Corona pandemic and the major changes and questions it had afflicted on all of us, I was searching for ways to make some sort of sense of the isolation the lockdown imposed on me and my family, and I realized that instead of running away from the fear I started to feel, I might finally be given the opportunity to stop everything I had be doing so far to suppress it, and look it straight into the eyes!
This is how I came to meet Wolf.
Many days I searched pictures of wolves, read their stories of being hunted and killed, including the heartbreaking story of the lonely Canadian wolf, Takaya, who for eight years had lived on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, until one day in late March, he was shot and killed by a hunter, he had come to close to.
“Takaya was shot because he came to trust people.“, says Cheryl Alexander, a photographer who documented much of Takaya’s existence. He’s convinced that it was curiosity that had come from gradual habituation to humans that eventually let to Takaya’s death. He sadly had learned that close contact with the human species never led to any serious harm. But because conflicts between humans and wolves overwhelmingly result in the death of the predator, fear is a necessary element for survival.
Through the story of the wild wolf, I came to understand the deeper meaning of my own fear, and that it actually served a purpose in my life — to protect me.
Fear isn’t so difficult to understand. After all, weren’t we all frightened as children? Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the big bad wolf. What frightens us today is exactly the same sort of thing that frightened us yesterday. It’s just a different wolf. This fright complex is rooted in every individual.
Alfred Hitchcock
I sat down and started with the initial sketches, which I then took into Procreate on my iPad to work on the Block Print Style Wolf — in memory of Takaya and all his fellow species who live and try to survive at the edge of their ecological niche, surrounded by the remains of a growing civilization.
I am so happy to announce that my very favorite design of a high summit wolf is now available at: