Some collaborations sing stronger than others. In some exceptional cases the artist and the author create a symbiotic relationship that hums in our hearts until we can’t be affected by one artist’s expression without it conjuring up the affection of the other.

When Anna Wilkenfeld’s portfolio arrived in our inbox a few Sunday’s ago the slick, clean lines and frames of the computer’s interface were broken and out spilled a host of characters and world’s that could not be forced to fit. We zoomed around her scenes marvelling at the human zoo that creeped and frolicked about the scenes Anna put them in. They were not perfect by any measure, they were crooked. Anna creates her characters like Fagan reared his pick pocketing urchins in Dicken’s Oliver Twist. She plays to their machiavellian nature, delivering their personality warts and all with grins and gazes that promise there is more below the surface.

Anna’s ability to get beneath the the skin of her subjects came from a strange place. Anna originally spent time working as a caricature artist and was told not to exaggerate the distinctive features of her subjects so as not to offend them. Like a dam wall struggling to hold back water, Anna could not contain her creative spirit within the confines of her job. So when the wall burst her personal work outside of her job flourished with new life. With her previous professional experience giving her the skills to make things nice she now reveals in the opportunity to let rip with her passion for what makes nasty so irresistible to our nature.