Art always used to involve spirit. Painters painted spirit. They painted by commission things to go into churches, and that was painting spirit. Or they would paint people of wealth, and they would try to show how they had power, and again, this is sort of spirit.
For me drawing is an attempt to understand what I feel about the world I live in.
Part of what I feel is that the so-called bad fairies are really only there to get you to pay some attention. They trick you up until you're lying flat on your back and you literally have another point of view. They're about loosening up being rigid. They trip you over to break the barrier between you and the world. So their so-called "badness" actually can be quite instrumental in helping you with things.
Fairies are becoming much more popular. I see fairyland as this big sea, and the tide is sometimes out.
I live in a house that's incredibly old, and it's typical that part of it is slightly in the ground. It's very earthed. It's almost like living in a hobbit house.
It was hard for me to move forward, because I take responsibility for what I introduce into the world through my paintings. So to actually introduce something evil or bad was quite hard for me.
It was ironic that there I was finally painting the pictures I'd always wanted to paint and feeling very much at home in the countryside, and I ended up working in New York City, which is definitely the archetypal city.
I had a job as an illustrator, and I wanted to change the direction of my work. I moved to the country, and immediately I started to paint fairies and trolls.
I went and studied graphic design, because it seemed to me that advertising is more honest - the image actually has a function. But once I started on that, I realized that was really boring.
In college, I became interested in folk tales and fairy tales. Gradually I became more and more interested in the underlying meaning of it all and the possibility of the reality of real fairies.
I paint the spirit and soul of what I see.
