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

Spirits were seen to be very much part of the everyday world, and you were accosted by spirits all the time. It's only really quite recently that we've relegated the fantastic as being just imagination and not real and having no purpose.

Once you step onto the fairy path, it's almost like there's no way off. You have to keep going.

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

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

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.

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.