Minka and the Bear.

I'm excited to announce that I have an interview up today on Freunde von Freunden, with one of my new favorite artists, Minka Sicklinger. Minka is well-known for her tattoo work, but she's an illustrator, too, and a former fashion stylist. In a past life, she says, she was a "treasure hunting pirate," and it shows: her tiny Manhattan apartment is filled with trinkets, taxidermy, and mementos from her travels. There are books on the floor, plants on the windowsills, a golden egg in the corner, and the head of a bear above her bed. It's her spirit animal, she says. It guards her as she sleeps.

Of her art, Minka says: "Every time I sit down at a blank page of paper I don’t know what’s going to come out. I draw how I see things, which is not necessarily how they look in real life. It’s like when I took photographs: I never really cared about what was in the frame. I cared about how those things got there and where they were going after." 

Read the full interview on Freunde von Freunden, and see more of Minka's work, here. You can find my past FvF interviews here, including this one with art director Aslan Malik, who has gold fingernails and a cat named after Anais Nin. (No big deal.)