Just as Eve

Israeli-born artist Kukula juxtaposes fairytales with femme fatale

By Jolene Torr
Published: November 6th, 2008 | 6:30pm

In olden times, when wishing still meant a damn to princesses, the doll-like Kukula sat in her high tower in Israel, doodling comics for an Israeli newspaper that made her sick, wishing for an escape plan: to be whisked away, wishing for the reason that people move from one place to another. He came in the form of an Israeli-American boy, who wanted her to join him in America, the land of promise. After six months, the immigration department kicked the artist out, so she married the boy and thus lived happily ever after, coming up on that Green Card and dropping F-bombs to the USCIS. Ha!

Born Nataly Abromovitch, the 28-year-old Israeli-born artist grew up a little lonely, lost in fancy and daydream. “I was what people like to call a weirdo,” she says. “I was alone a lot and dreamed about castles, garden ponies, and fancy gowns. Most of my friends were my old Holocaust survivor grandpa and his friends. They acted very weird,” she muses. “I think that was the basic recipe for the dreamy, cute, and melancholy princess that I was.”

In Tel Aviv, Kukula’s heart bloomed in art school. “It was the first time I didn’t want everybody to die and they didn’t want me to die too,” she says. “At first they seemed arrogant and made me scared and feel small and sad, but quickly I learned they were all shy and insecure just like me.” So it goes.

After being whisked to Los Angeles, Kukula watched a shitload of TV before being discovered by none other than a mega-social networking site, and since, she’s been able to showcase her burlesque babes, who are part fairytale, part femme fatale with their big heads and tiny bods, just dripping with sexuality.

It’s easy to make the comparisons between her work and Mark Ryden’s or Fafi’s, but Kukula shirks this resemblance. “People like to compare everything that is new to them with what they already know,” she scorns. “I don’t think I like when they do that, but I don’t care anymore. I prefer to not be compared in general. To no one or anything.”

Her artwork nonetheless captures that similar juxtaposition of girlhood her contemporaries explore: the naïveté of girlhood versus the sexual maturity and awareness of girlhood. But her paintings do not exploit these traits. They give pride of place to “the woman.” They sing her praises: vamps in knee highs and corseted coquettes, who are in some ways reflections of the archetype of Eve, with their compliant animal friends and soft-bellied creatures positioned as ornaments at the feet of the sensuous heroines. As an artist who concentrates on girls and sex, it’s hard not to separate gender from artist. “I sometimes think it’s more okay for a woman to depict sexuality in a girl character,” she says, “because it’s more a self-portrait than a manly sexual fantasy.”

She lives on childhood, on inspirations from Holly Hobbie and folklore, sadness, and that adolescent urge to define and explore yet inhibit sexuality. On the subject of her young, chaste-faced subjects, Kukula examines the curiosity of adolescence as well as regular old female sauciness. “I think that the female sexuality forms at a pretty early age and that women know themselves very well since they are little girls,” she explains in charming broken English. “I think that this little girls is the real personality in every woman,” she says. “I think it's important not to ignore the child in us because then we just turn dull and boring.”

Dressed in their ruffles and petticoats, boobies abound, Kukula’s girls pose in waiting, like large dolls, waiting for someone to come along and take them out of their boxes to play with them. They carry that sensual, serene air of reverie, sense of melancholy and of detachment, with slight passivity that is part of the modern girl’s allure. Heavy-lidded and made up like girls of easy virtue, Kukula’s dolls are bewitching, telling, loving, and dying, with a mysterious inner light.

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See more of Kukula's work on her Web site, kukulaland.com.