I wanted to be part of a magical realm, and so I created one for myself." At about age five, as soon as I could bend a pipe-cleaner and bits of fabric together, I started to make the kind of dolls I couldn't find in stores: centaurs, satyrs, fauns, unicorns, and faeries.
"Both of my parents were artists," she says. Wendy was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. It was on the set of The Dark Crystal that Brian met Wendy, who created the "gelflings" and other creatures for the film. Like Faeries, the films were ground-breaking - pioneering new puppet design and performance techniques. This marvelous, ground-breaking volume quickly became an international bestseller, and has influenced artists, writers, and folklorists all around the world in the decades since.īrian's faeries and magical vision of the world so impressed the American filmmaker Jim Henson (creator of the Muppets) that he asked Brian to come to New York to design two feature films: The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. Inspired by the woods and hedgerows of Devon, and the ancient, myth-steeped landscape of the moor, the two collaborated on Faeries, an illustrated book of British faery lore. In 1975, Brian moved from London to a small Devon village at Dartmoor's edge, sharing a house with fellow-illustrator Alan Lee and his family. (This early work was published in Once Upon a Time and The Land of Froud, both from David Larkin's Peacock Press.) When he left collage, Brian spent five years in London working in the field of commercial illustration, but he continued to paint mythic images and to develop a distinctive style of his own. He began to study the folklore of Britain, and then the tales of other lands, fascinated by the ways the magical traditions in all cultures shared common roots. Rackham's goblins, faeries, undines, and tree folk re-awakening Brian's interest in the myths and legends he'd loved in childhood. His deep involvement with folklore and myth began during his student days, he says, when he came across a book illustrated by Arthur Rackham in his college library.
Faeries, goblins, trolls and sprites stare down from Brian's paintings on the walls, and cavort in the shape of magical dolls and sculptures created by Wendy.īrian was born in Hampshire, raised Kent, and studied at the Maidstone College of Art. Inside is the kind of enchanted house one usually finds only in fantasy books: full of carved medieval furniture and tapestries, costumes, masks, old books, puppets and magical props from films. Its old front door, with a goblin door-knocker, is a doorway into Faerieland. The Froud family's thatch-roof farmhouse sits buried in ivy down a quiet country lane in England's West Country.
0 kommentar(er)
