Sophia Violet (Sophie) Crumb, born in 1981 in Woodland, California, began drawing at the age of two. An avid reader of comics as a child, Crumb contributed early illustrations to her parents’ underground series Weirdo and Dirty Laundry Comics. In 1991, her parents—comix legends Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crumb—relocated the family to a village in the south of France in 1991, seeking distance from American political conservatism and Christian fundamentalism, and as they put it, to keep Sophie from becoming a “Vallery girl”. Crumb later studied acrobatics and clowning at a French circus school, before moving to Brooklyn in the mid-2000s to apprentice as a tattoo artist. She currently lives and works in the south of France.

Crumb is known for her distinct graphic style, which offers sharp, often wry reflections on personal experience, her family, and broader cultural phenomena, filtered through her unique generational lens. Her portraits and illustrations span a range of modes, from surreal, naturalistic drawings that reveal her technical virtuosity and chiaroscuro skills to exaggerated, comical caricatures. Many of her anonymous figures are drawn from old photography books, though the subject of the present ink and watercolor drawing is the artist herself, immersed in tattoo ornamentation.