Lisbeth Zwerger
Little Red Cap was met by a Wolf
circa 2012
There is a delicacy to this illustration - almost a fragility - that visually enunciates the mounting tension of the scene. The wolf (or should one say Zwerger herself?) cunningly places itself in an agreeable spot by which Little Red Cap will surely pass, unaware and always curious. The wolf’s position is angled and higher than that of the girl, placing the audience at a point from which it, too, fills the role of a spy. With its right paw and chin resting smartly against the mossy tree trunk, the wolf forms an elegant curve from the tip of its tail, up along its wiry back and ending with its darkly-lined, perked ears. Apart from being wonderfully drawn and imbued with an unmistakably sly character, the wolf’s shape brings together the foreground with the middle ground, almost as a foreboding act of drawing Little Red Cap further up the hill towards the story’s climactical meeting between predator and prey. The space behind the girl is intentionally blank: stretching out and beyond her and the receding trees, it represents the trouble-less, wolf-free life that she leaves in her wake, as well as her innocence of youth. It is now only a question of what will soon happen after she looks up and into the eyes of her stalker for the first time, and whether or not it is truly a wolf, or in fact something more.
