Your Curator
It is so nice you want to know a bit more about me.
I was born in 1972 in the Netherlands (on Valentine’s Day, of all days) and still live here. I’m married to a great guy who completely gets why I spend so much time on this site. He never complains when I disappear into cyberspace hunting for vintage fetish art, which happens more often than I care to admit.
My online names are MisTique, Miss Vintagique and BdsmArtLover. What started around 2003–2004 as a small personal blog about spanking art has slowly grown into VintageBDSMart. The site now holds well over 17,000 artworks, many of them rare or nearly forgotten.
I’m not a professional historian. I’m just someone who loves this material and refuses to let it disappear. I spend a lot of hours comparing scans, looking for better versions, and trying to put names and context to artists who often worked under pseudonyms because of censorship or legal trouble. I especially like the playful, witty and affectionate side of the genre, artists like Chéri Hérouard (Herric) are favourites of mine.
After years of working in web design and internet marketing I had to stop, because physically it became too much and the chronic fatigue made it impossible to continue. Working on my sites isn’t a full-time job, it simply grew out of the need to keep myself intellectually and mentally challenged, and to stay busy with something that truly lies close to my heart.
The premium memberships exist to keep the servers running and to let me keep improving the collection with higher-quality, watermark-free images. No matter how much I would like it to be otherwise, I barely earn anything from working on this site. From time to time I even have to put my own money into it just to keep the hosting paid.
A paid membership really does make a difference, it helps preserve this heritage.
Besides this site I also run a few free BDSM art blogs, the Dutch-language sites BdsmMinnend and Duale.blog, and I’m active on FetLife, X and Deviant Art.
Karen Smits
If you want to contact me feel free to reach out through my social media platforms. Alternatively, use the contact form at this site.