“The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.”- Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Many years ago, when I was still a child, and a lot less tangled in the world’s anxieties and cynicism, I came across some magical cards. They belonged to my mother and they sparkled with the magic of faerie. These cards of course were the work of the amazing Brian Froud. Soon, so enamoured with The Faerie Oracle, my mother bought me my own set, perhaps so I could keep my grubby fingers off of her’s, but also as a way to encourage my love of all things faerie and magical. These oracle cards filled my everyday- I would stare at them, read them and the book they came with, and even draw them. Times would come when I would go out to the log cabins with my father and I would draw the faerie beings I saw in the woods and rivers. So enamoured with faerie lore I became, that I got hold of Brian Froud and Alan Lee’s Masterpiece “Faeries”. I remember once at the log cabins near the river, the feeling of something pulling me towards it. Something like Jenny Greenteeth, who I imagined wanted nothing more than to drown me with her river-slick fingers. Still I was fascinated with that place and would often go on little walks by myself- river hags or no- until it was time to return home to the more domestic of faery kind.
I don’t know if back then I wanted to be “an artist” or “an illustrator”. I don’t even think I really grasped the concept of what an illustrator was, I just wanted to draw- like all children instinctively do. I thought Brian Froud (and Alan Lee) were particularly gifted at capturing this other world that most other adults and even older or more world-weary children didn’t see. Many of them felt it was nothing but a fiction, a figment of imagination, and even a bit of silly fantasy. But it was all very real to me. I never stopped believing in faeries, even when my world grew more chaotic, and the raging hormones of teenage angst kicked in. Secretly I believed. Secretly I knew. Many years later, I went to University to study my passion- the “Fine Arts”. I thought it would be enlightening, helpful, and a wonderful way to set me up for a career in the arts- whatever that even means to an eighteen-year-old. I was rather naive back then. They didn’t want fantastical art, or such, and there was no appreciation for fairy. It drained my passion, and along with it, the enchanted world that I had known. The adult world is like that. Only certain stories are valuable, and the rest, well, the rest are to be left behind and forgotten in childhood where they are thought to belong.
It took a long while, and a few dark, painful, near death experiences later to remember how important art was to me. How I once drew with abandon, not caring about rights, or wrongs, or the anxious perfectionism that pervades any form of creation as an adult. And slowly I came back.
I have had (and still have) a great many artistic influences over the years, but the oldest, longest and truest is Brian Froud, whose work proudly adorns my fantasy bookshelf. I still read the oracle every now and then, and still flip through the books, beguiled and captivated by that “other” faerie world. Over the years I have read and loved much Faerie lore and practice, including books by Morgan Daimler, Lee Morgan, and Katharine Briggs.
Along the way, I remembered something else… Something more terrestrial, but no less enchanting, which had held me deeply captivated since I was a child, something that has its own ties to faerie, and something which held its own in-the-earth-blood-and-tooth-and-fur kind of magic- the Animal. I noticed that many of Froud’s Faeries had animal-like forms and features. Christina Rossetti’s sumptuous poem ” The Goblin market” described the Goblins in an animal-like way. How within folklore how fairies coveted, pestered, blighted, and stole away animals from humans, took the forms of animals themselves, and even had their own magical array of animals, like cows and hounds.
In my own art at the time, foxes became faeries, spiders could talk, and toads swallowed the moon. There was always something of the fairytale and the otherworld in my art. This world and the other were separated only by a paper-thin, gossamer-like veil. A veil which was quite man-made, because fantasy and fairies, and talking animals, well those are for children, not for rational, sane adults. That is, after-all, why children’s books have that magical, nostalgic glow about them. We forgot them in our trunks, and dusty bookshelves, gave them away, or even had them torn from us, as the world grew more full of the yuck of despair which sucks us dry. Folklore, Fairytales and Folk magic were once a part of everyday life, and now, well, now we often just wile away the mundanity of our lives without ever seeing the magic that exists in the everyday. At some point, after much fumbling, and experimentation, my art became about that other world again. The biggest turning point I think, was my artwork “Threshold”, which in and of itself hints at that doorway to the otherworld, the doorway which is animal, that doorway which is art.
“In the dark night looming, a ghostly bramble glows, At the edge of dreams and sleep, Within the crooked hedgerows, A Hare of moonlight and spirit fog Dances round times nine, Another world beckons As I slip outside of time.” Art has always done this for me, taken me into another world. I can spend hours there, amongst the wild and fae, as I paint or draw. But, even so, It is not about escapism, as much as art does offer an escape from the ugliness in the world. For me it is about living more intensely in this one. It is about re-enchantment. About developing a deeper and closer relationship with the land, the animals, the plants and the very many beautiful things which make up my life. I have written before about nature and books being doorways into the other, and here I hope I have shown, at least in part, how art is another of those doorways. It doesn’t require all the talent of the Master’s of Art. All it requires is a quietness and willingness to notice, an openness to anything happening, your own creative expression, and whichever form that may take. My own art journey continues down the path which “The Dream Keeper” has laid, where the other-than-human are honoured, loved and respected through illustration.
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