35 Quotes by Brian Froud

For me drawing is an attempt to understand what I feel about the world I live in.

Nobody wanted to publish a book about fairies; they said people wouldn’t be interested. Luckily, I discovered Lady Cottington and her pressed fairies, which revived a huge amount of interest in fairies, so I could go ahead and do the book I wanted to do.

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

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.

Faeries are seen through the heart, not through the eyes. Remember that faeries inhabit the interior of the earth and the interior of all things, so look, in the first place, in the interior of yourself.

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

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.

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.

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