Quotes from Brian Froud

I started studying as an artist, but I got fed up with the fact that you can paint terrible pictures and if you explain them in an erudite way it's called great art. I thought this was rubbish.

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

You do not see fairies through the eyes, you see them through the heart and that took me a long time to learn because I was always trying to see them through my eyes.

Not all meanings are meant to be clear at once. Some ideas take time. Some words are designed to lead us on inner journeys, with truth hidden deep inside them.

My art's not safe, I don't want it to be safe, it's not meant to be safe, its controversial, it takes you into deep areas, it's a journey, its starts off in safe areas but it gets into deep waters.

I paint the spirit and soul of what I see.

Perhaps all women are part faerie, for what woman can deny her faerie blood when the portals to her own land are open; when the full moon sings its insistent song; when sorrow and passion and rage pulse through her body at moon times. This is why women are the chosen ones of Faerie, pat of the vibrant, fluid, emotional soul of the world…

I feel that what you should illustrate is the space between the words. It's the betweenness, the otherness, that gives depth and dimension.

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.

Voices in the forest tell of dark and twisted enchantments - as dark and twisted as the roots and grasping branches of the trees themselves. Even the most gnarled tree is eloquent in the telling of its own tale.

Perhaps all women are part faerie, for what woman can deny her faerie blood when the portals to her own land are open; when the full moon sings its insistent song; when sorrow and passion and rage pulse through her body at moon times. This is why women are the chosen ones of Faerie, part of the vibrant, fluid, emotional soul of the world…

The sylph is a fragment of the earth's soul in faery form.

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.

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.

It seems to me that art has lost its connection to spirit.