Brian Froud Quotes

I've been actively engaged with mythic imagery ever since I picked up that Rackham book, but it really came into focus for me when I moved from London to the country. As I walked the extraordinary landscape of Dartmoor, I looked at the trees and the rocks and the hills and I could see the personality in those forms ... then they metamorphosed under my pencil into faeries, goblins and trolls. After Alan and I published "Faeries", he moved on from the subject of faery folklore to illustrate Tolkien and other literary works ... while I discovered that my own exploration of Faerieland had only just begun. In the countryside, the old stories seemed to come alive around me; the faeries were a tangible aspect of the landscape, pulses of spirit, emotion, and light. They "insisted" on taking form under my pencil, emerging on the page before me cloaked in archetypal shapes drawn from nature and myth. I'd attracted their attention, you see, and they hadn't finished with me yet.

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.

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.

To me, intolerance leads down a dreadful path that the world sometimes seems to be going to.

I always believed that the picture itself should tell the story.

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 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.

Once upon a time, I thought faeries lived only in books, old folktales, and the past. That was before they burst upon my life as vibrant, luminous beings, permeating my art and my everyday existence, causing glorious havoc.

Naming a fairy is notoriously difficult, because they don't particularly like to be named. There are so many of them, and humans have always wanted to categorize them. In that way, we think we can have more control over them.

Fairies are becoming much more popular. I see fairyland as this big sea, and the tide is sometimes out.

To believe in faeries is to step into an enchanted space where the rational mind meets the irrational heart, and all things become possible.

The myths and legends about Faerie are many and diverse, and often contradictory. Only one thing is certain - that nothing is certain. All things are possible in the land of Faerie.

Faeries are not fantasy, but a connection to reality. Faeries are irrational, poetic, absurd, and very, very wise. Faeries say there is nonsense in dogma, and sense in nonsense. Faeries express themselves with high seriousness and low humour. Faeries are resistant to all definitions.

For me drawing is an attempt to understand what I feel about the world I live in.

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.

Anytime that is 'betwixt and between' or transitional is the faeries' favorite time. They inhabit transitional spaces: the bottom of the garden, existing in a space between manmade cultivation and wilderness. Look for them in the space between nurture and nature, they are to be found at all boarders and boundaries, or on the edges of water where it is neither land nor lake, neither path nor pond. They come when we are half-asleep. They come at moments when we least expect them; when our rational mind balances with the fluid irrational.

Spirits were seen to be very much part of the everyday world, and you were accosted by spirits all the time. It's only really quite recently that we've relegated the fantastic as being just imagination and not real and having no purpose.

We almost need another word for fairy, that's the thing. Once people get to see what fairies' real power is, then they understand.

Remember, as each man and woman is a microcosm reflecting the larger natural world, so healing of the self is also a healing for the world. As above, so below.