Fairies are becoming much more popular. I see fairyland as this big sea, and the tide is sometimes out.

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

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 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.

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.