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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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