How would you describe your relationship with Faery?
My relationship is that of the poet to the muse, the warrior to the fire of courage, and the human soul to nature. Faery connects me to the light in the land and the possibility of beauty. It also is helpful to me in that it affords an opportunity for my sceptical brain to hold space with my imagination and with energetic and emotional experiences. It is good to doubt the reality of the unseen realms and simultaneously stretch my mind to include rationally inexplicable happenings. Making space for dissonance keeps us strong and flexible. I have experiences of Faery and can also hold that these perceptions feel irrational. I’m okay with that.
T. Thorn Coyle
Why is working with the seven directions important?
The seven sacred directions help to orient us in space and time. We have a center at our core and a circumference that extends 360 degrees around us. If I can maintain awareness of the horizon all around me, as well as above and below, I can remain centered in my life and my work, and remain in relationship with everything I interact with. The seven directions remind me that my whole life is about this relationship. I don’t just focus on what is in front of me but interact with all spaces around me, including what is just beyond the edge of my perception. Working with the seven sacred directions also serves as a link to magick workers of old, who studied the seven visible planets or intoned the seven vowels or walked through the seven gates or called upon the seven angels. It connects us to our magickal legacy and opens us to what is yet to come. The seven directions also help me remember that there is more to the world than my eyes and ears perceive. There is possibility all around me in every moment.
What change would you like to bring into the world?
I would like for connection to become deeply important. I would like for each human to practice internal alignment so that our relationship to the world can come into greater alignment, so that our relationship with all the worlds can come into greater alignment. We can be strong, autonomous, compassionate, and free, living in right relationship, bringing our systems of imbalance toward integration. I would like for more and more people to want this change and actively work toward its fulfilment. I’ll keep starting with myself.
For further information, visit www.thorncoyle.com.
The Resurgence of Faery Inspiration
“It is Credibly Asserted, that in ancient times that many of those aforesaid Gnomes, Fairies Elves & other terrestrial wandering spirits, have been seen & heard amongst Men, but now it is said & believed that they are not so frequent.”
The seventeenth-century Sloane MS 3825
It seems that every generation for the last several hundred years has commented on the dwindling relationship between humans and faeries, and yet most of the traditions, groups, and paths we have looked at in this chapter were either born or have grown immensely in popularity over the last half century! While all are expressed in diverse ways, what all these paths have in common is the theme of uncovering and embracing our true selves in order to be more fully in the world. When we can truly know and be ourselves, we can find what it is we are here to do. We can then use these gifts to build a bridge to the realm of Faery, just as the following inspirational artists, musicians, writers, entertainers, and craftspeople are doing through their work. May their words inspire you to find your soul’s true expression and bring potential to full bloom!
The Artists
There are many incredible artists working within the Faery community today, each with their own distinctive style and approach, yet all drawing their inspiration from the same source: the realm of Faery. I was lucky enough to be able to interview a few of the most influential and inspirational figures in the world of Faery art today, and here I share with you a glimpse into the lives of the people behind the beautiful art.
Brian and Wendy Froud
Brian and Wendy Froud are loved and respected around the world, bringing joy and inspiration to many through their many years of sharing their visions of Faery with the world. Brian is a fine artist and illustrator perhaps best known for his work as a conceptual artist in the 1980s hit movies Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal, as well as many beautiful published works, including Faeries (with Alan Lee), Good Fairies/Bad Faeries, The Faeries Oracle (with Jessica Macbeth), and most recently How To See Fairies (with John Matthews).
Wendy is a doll artist, sculptor, and puppet-maker extraordinaire, with many published works to her name, including The Winter Child and The Faeries of Spring Cottage, as well as a recent collaboration with Brian on the Heart of Faery Oracle. Not only has Wendy worked alongside Brian on Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal, but she was one of the original team of sculptors who created Yoda for The Empire Strikes Back! I visited Brian and Wendy in their beautiful hobbitlike home in rural Devon, UK, to gain some insight into their creative process and relationship with Faery.
Brian Froud, “Woodwoman”
I’m not going to bother asking if you believe in faeries, because we know you do…
B: People assume I’m just illustrating something, and I say no, I’m expressing something. There’s a big difference. Now we’ve just got this book out with John Matthews called How To See Faeries, there’s no way around it. Right now people are saying, “Ah, these people really do believe in faeries and are telling us about it,” and that, I think, has been a breakthrough in getting people to understand we do believe.
How did your awareness of the Faery realm first enter your life?
W: For me, it came really from my mother and my mother’s family. She’s always believed, and she just taught me to believe from an early age. It was just the most natural thing, and it wasn’t a cute little game we played or anything, it was just that they were there, and we could leave things for them, and we could feel them. We couldn’t see them particularly, but we could always feel them, so I just grew up thinking it was the most natural thing in the world.
B: I don’t know, because in Faery time it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. However, there were a couple of events that were reminders. One was when I was at art school and I was about to give up painting, because I felt that was not the right thing and not expressive of what I wanted to do, and I was going to do graphic design. As I was waiting in the college library for my interview I came across a book by Arthur Rackham, and in it were these wonderful drawings of trees with faces in, and that was the revelation. I thought, “That’s how I felt as a child.” I was always exploring woods, climbing trees, crawling underneath bushes, and there was something about the faces that informed you there was spirit in nature, and that got me into exploring Faery tales and more and more exploring the reality behind Faery tales and faeries themselves.
The next thing was when I moved to Dartmoor and I experienced nature—rocks and trees and roots and earth—and I realised that I didn’t want to be a normal landscape painter, I wanted to paint the landscape that was the inner landscape. I wanted to know what it looked like on the inside, and once I felt that, then I started to paint trolls and faeries.
I discovered faeries really by making it up, by trying to imagine what it was…but it was always about feeling. So I brought all my skills as an artist to bear on trying to get the form and shape of what I was painting to feel like something that was elusive and invisible. Then I did various pictures, paintings, bits of books, and then the book, the Faeries book. Alan Lee and myself just tumbled into it, just went for it. We did research, we were both enthusiastic about English, Irish, and Scottish folklore, and we just worked from the descriptions that people had given over the years and drew it.
I think because we did it with passion and insight, we were getting it right, and people really responded to it. But it was only really years later when I embarked upon another book, called Good Faeries/Bad Faeries, which was more about my inner worldview of faeries, more about how I was feeling about them, and it was
more of a spiritual thing, and again I did it really through intuition. It’s really only when that was finished and I was on tour with the book and signing the book, I started to spontaneously experience faeries on the streets of America!
W: That’s the book you have to write, that’s the book I want you to write someday! It is amazing, the story.
B: It is a rare thing for me to have those spontaneous Faery experiences, but they are real.
So really you are translating a feeling into a visual interpretation, which creates that same feeling in the viewer, creating a bridge in that way?
W: Very much so, they are a bridge to the otherworld, or a doorway, a gateway. Very often with our work, people will look at it and they will have a very emotional response when they experience it. It’s something about “coming home.” It’s something about going to a place that they forgot they knew so well. That’s wonderful.
How well do think you’ve portrayed you feelings or your vision of the otherworld—how close do you think you’ve got?
W: I don’t think it’s anything like what they really are, only how they appear. Sometimes I think they do look like that, but usually they are energy. It’s impossible, I think, especially in three dimensions, it’s impossible to capture it because so much of it is the energy, and you can’t really sculpt that.
Wendy Froud, “Autumn”
B: Well, I think I’ve got nowhere near! After all these years I haven’t got anywhere near, but I keep trying. People want to believe what I’m showing them is real, and they go, “Oh, that’s how they look, isn’t it?” and I say, “Well, actually, no. It’s how they feel.” You’ve got to bring people to some place where they can understand and feel it, and also that is a genuine opening, a genuine gateway to the reality—not only to the wider reality but to that specific or particular personality.
A genuine experience of Faery seems to be clear whilst it’s happening, but afterwards it’s impossible to express. It seems vague because so many different aspects come to bear in that experience, it isn’t just a visual thing, it’s an “other” thing—an other thing of otherness! The problem is when you try to express any of this stuff, everything fails. Words fail, pictures fail, everything is failing in one of the most astonishing and beautiful events. So to do what I do is trying to do the impossible, but I believe in it passionately.
Often the paintings are either doorways or, in the more complex ones, maps. They’re maps into Faeryland that you explore and you follow shapes. Shapes are very important in what I do because it’s the abstractions. I put geometry in so when you look at one of the pictures it isn’t just surface, it’s something that happens underneath that propels you not just deep into Faeryland but out into the cosmos. What I try to do is something mystical.
Faery art in particular needs to be expressive of—well, of Faery! People have a preconceived idea of what they should be, and they don’t like anything that challenges that idea. But the idea is incredibly recent, faeries have been with us forever and been part of our spiritual life as well as part of our cultural life.
I’ve been thinking of this a lot—obviously with my own work, thinking about the journey of our relationship with Faery—and it seems to me that it all changed around the Industrial Revolution. There’s this idea of trying to tame nature, and that’s perhaps when we started trying to tame faeries too…
B: I haven’t got an answer to that, that really fascinates me. It does seem to me that the Industrial Revolution is a bit of a watershed. There is lots of folklore evidence of faeries and Faery creatures that are in the country in that period, but not any evidence of them being in the cotton mills, for instance, and there should be. Did people, as they moved from the country, bring spirits with them or not? They don’t seem to, or it’s been hidden. They don’t seem to show up in the industrial landscape.
W: Too much iron…
Wendy Froud, “Bad Faery”
You’ve seen them on the streets of America—in an urban environment?
W: Very much so!
B: Always. One of the ones that was odd, I can’t remember exactly where it was but it was on the East Coast. I was walking down the street and I felt there were leprechauns around. I thought, “That’s really stupid, why would there be leprechauns on the edge of America?” Then I saw a plaque on a pole standing there in this weird long, open space, and it said, “On this site were the fever sheds.” It’s when the Irish immigrants were coming in on boats, and they had yellow fever. They were put in the sheds to die, basically, to isolate them. They brought the leprechauns with them!
That’s interesting, isn’t it, because we know that faeries are connected to the land but clearly they are also connected to us ancestrally…
B: It does seem that people bring their faeries with them, because I had another experience around San Francisco which was again a leprechaun, but he was on the edge of a field and a wood and my conversations with him were always on the edge of the day, always the morning, sitting there with a cup of coffee and thinking about things. The actual physical place was a hundred yards away from where I was sitting, but there was a conversation that would happen with a leprechaun. It was distinctly a leprechaun, with all the accoutrements—the tricorn hat became quite important in his communications with me. It was just fascinating. But it was a leprechaun! Why? But you can’t question this stuff—you can try, but you just have to trust it. If you don’t get it, it’s you being stupid because there’ll be a moment where there’ll be some revelation and you’ll think, “Yes, of course! That’s what it was trying to say!”
Is it that the spirits travel with people, do you think, or is it that the spirits of that place choose familiar forms from our own subconscious, or based on the people they’ve had contact with, to communicate with us?
W: It could be either one…probably both…
B: Yes, absolutely both. The pure energy is unintelligible; you need form, you need some intelligible form.
W: That’s why we can portray things.
B: So either you can provide the form as the human aspect, or they provide the form. Sometimes the form is truly expressive of its nature, and sometimes its form is not an expression of its nature, it’s just a way of allowing you into the space so that you can understand its inner nature.
Like a mask?
B: Yes.
Do you have practices that maintain your connection with Faery?
W: We do leave offerings in the garden, yes. But I think that because of where we live, because that energy is just a constant here with us, we don’t have to be conscious of it all the time. We really do just live with it, and it’s a part of where we live. I think that if we moved, or if we were in another place for long enough, we’d have to be more aware of it and very consciously try to communicate. Whereas here, we don’t really…we share the space with them.
B: Generally everything we do is about Faery…it’s just continuous, so we don’t have to do things deliberately.
W: Although it’s interesting because when we do go out into the circle and do ritual, the energy is just amazing. We had a blessing ceremony that John and Caitlín (Matthews) did as part of a wedding, and since then the energy has been so much stronger and more focused.
B: They did a Faery blessing for the wedding, and I think that lots of people who were invited didn’t know what to expect, and everybody was amazed.
W: And I think a lot of people felt that they were restating their own vow at the same time, so it was like a collective blessing for everyone. It was wonderful.
B: Also, people tend to think faeries are “airy fairy,” and what was happening was a reconnection to the land itself—people felt they were connected to their own landscape. People just love that, they were moved by it.
Do you have particular beings that you work with or is it a variety of beings that come forward at diffe
rent times?
W: For me they just come forward when they need to; I don’t have one that’s there to help all the time. There’s so many! They all want a turn, they want to come forward and push their way to the front.
B: I had one that came back with me, a few years ago, from America. It came and stayed a long time in the house. I promised to take it back if it ever wanted to go back, and it wanted to go back, so I took it back to where it had come from. So that had been very helpful. I’m not a person who constantly dwells on it or checks in. When I do check in occasionally, it’s always astonishing when these beings are there and imparting something, some help. So now I have another one! There always seems to be one special one, for a while anyway.
How do you find that you influence and support each other?
W: I think we’ve worked together in many ways since we’ve been together, which is over thirty years now—such a long time! But we’ve only just recently begun to collaborate on projects together to this extent. To write about Brian’s work I find fascinating because I hadn’t really done that before; I did it for the oracle deck and really enjoyed it. We have to be aware of each other’s egos when we’re working together, really, because we both have a tendency to be able to point out exactly what’s wrong with the other person’s work but if you say it in the wrong way we would just storm off into our studios and then later on go, “Oh, you were right, you were right!”
How would you like to develop your work in the future? What would you like to achieve?
W: It would be nice to do film again, something new that goes even further than we went before…
Can it have Bowie in tight trousers again?
W: Yeah, maybe…he’s older now. Maybe Johnny Depp?
B: It’s problematic trying to think of doing something in three dimensions and in movement. I’m in despair when I see how films are made now and how you do it. But it still, one hopes, can be done. I was just in London at the Little Angel Puppet Theatre, and they showed Labyrinth. They said they could have sold the tickets time after time because they only did one showing. It’s just how people responded to it. To try and figure out what it is about Labyrinth and Dark Crystal, it’s the thing that you don’t see. You’re looking at a movie, but you’re also feeling something else. It’s that other magic that went on that’s beneath the surface and about how you get that onscreen. It came from a different direction, whereas many people who make movies now, it’s about money and market research and all this stuff but not allowing the mystery to shine through. It would be wonderful to be able to attempt to do something that was slightly out of your grasp when you were making it, and you didn’t quite understand it. Those films have had longevity because they were not of their time, they were of another time that’s fluid and therefore continues to be timeless. It’s intriguing to think, is it possible to do something like that again? I don’t know…
Faery Craft: Weaving Connections with the Enchanted Realm Page 20