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

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.

In the 20th century, artists did a great disservice to fairies. They painted fairies in a way that was shallow and trite. So when people see my stuff, they suddenly realize the depth of fairies.

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.

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

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.