German illustrator Sandra drew our beautiful cover for this issue
of WOLF - with her passion being animals and nature, Dieckmann’s
richly layered and intensely detailed work was just perfect for our first issue...
Can you remember what first brought you to illustration? At what point did you decide that it might be something you would like to do in a professional sense?
I can’t really say that anything brought me to illustration. I don’t remember ever thinking about it as a thing someone would do profes- sionally until much later on. It was just a part of me. Sketching, painting, making things, observing and having fun with imagery. I have always been a visual person. Even as a child, I could never remember numbers or names but faces and the colour of people’s eyes and what they had been wear- ing, how they walked and talked. It left an imprint in my mind. I remember passing a biology exam that ev- eryone had been studying for for months and I had only revised for a few hours earlier, purely by remembering the position of the images and text in the book. It was as if I had taken a photograph of it in my head.
Illustration as a label is something I’m slightly uncomfortable with. I know I’m an image maker. I know that I translate my thoughts and feel- ings into pictures that communicate something, even if that is different to each and every recipient.
As I said in a previous interview I would still be making images if you were unable to put me in a labeled box. It’s just a way of expression for me and now that the feedback is there and has been for a while, I’m reflecting more and more on my own process and I guess that itself is turning me into a professional illustrator. I still have much to learn and understand but life is long and I’m not in a rush. It’s something I
love doing and that grows with me. If it feeds me so it shall be.
Have you ever had any terrible jobs that still haunt you?
Let me think. I have been a pizza delivery kitchen assistant, a checkout girl, a vet as- sistant, a sport shoe saleswoman, a fashion sales assistant, a waitress, a baker, a hostess, a German tutor and a manager for the RSPCA not forgetting a student for most of my life - Textiles, Fashion, Graphic design and Illustra- tion. I think that is all. As part of the lower middle class I’ve been employed since the age of 15 and proud to say that no job has ever been full-time. The worst of all of them must have been the sports shoe job.
I’m first of all not athletic, not interested in sports shoes and really not interested in having a chauvinistic boss making sexual remarks all day and breathing down my neck in a store no bigger than 4 square meters. If I wasn’t an artist I wouldn’t be alive. I wouldn’t be me. Whatever I’d be doing I would take the time to let what’s in there out. Before studying Graphic design there was a time when I was convinced that I wanted to study veterinary medicine. I even learned Latin for that, believe it or not. A large part of me remains interested in biology and animals and anatomy, which you might see reflected in my work.
Your images paint such a blissful and idyllic picture of the natural world – something you say is inspired by your nature-filled upbringing. Why did you choose to move to a city?
When I handed my books back to my high school library in Germany my English teacher there asked me if I would be interested in topping up my language skills for a year by being a live-in Au-pair in London. At the time I had already secured a place studying art therapy in Siegen and was planning to move in with my best friend there. I threw it all away and within a few months I was over here.
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