Brian Froud’s “World of Faerie” is one of the most precious gifts in illustration in the 21th Century. Every year, all I want from Santa for Christmas is a book from Brian Froud or some old toy from my childhood, just because that’s what makes me feel more excited. This year, the Three Kings -the Spanish version for Santa- brought me this marvelous book and I have to say it made me feel as much amazed as the very first time I saw the book “Faeries”.

This is not the first nor the last time I’m talking on this web site about the influence of Briand Froud on my own work and life. Hopefully, after my teenage years I managed to accept that I couldn’t be a “Brian Froud” myself and that I needed to find my own identity as an artist. One of the reasons is because I don’t even have the kind of artistic skills or insight than him, so it would never really work. However his influence has always been and always will be there, and I’m very glad to look at his work with respect and embrace it with humbleness.

I remember the discovery of “Faeries” by Briand Froud and Alan Lee as one of the most important moments in my career as an artist. When I was 14 I used to spend every Saturday evening at a big bookstore in Madrid called La Casa del Libro. I would spend hours in the Art department, just diving through hundreds of volumes of art, photography and comics. It was the early 80′s and I was into comics. The Comic publishing world in Barcelona was strong at the time, with comic magazines such as Cimoc, Metal Hurlant and 1984. At the same time, the illustration books by Paper Tiger was happening in the UK. I had no money enough to buy the books I wanted, they were pretty expensive for my short budget, so I would just spend the hours at the bookshop looking at them until I saved money enough to buy them.

The truth is that I was never sure that drawing comics would be my thing. It sounds naive now but at the time I didn’t know there was such thing as being an artist illustrator, I didn´t know there were other choices. Wether you were an art painter, or you work as an illustrator for other writers or at a design studio, or you would be a comic artist. None of these choices seemed to be my cup of tea. So this particular evening I discovered this amazing book called “Faeries” -which had just been published in Spain- and then everything changed. The book showed me how it was possible to be an author and publish my own art and stories in the shape of a book. Yes, when I discover the work of Brian Froud and Alan Lee, and soon later the work of Patrick Woodroffe, then my whole scope of being a professional artist changed.

On the other hand, my first contact with “Faeries” was not just a professional event. It unveiled the world of faeries and old folk traditions to my eyes. I didn’t know anything about all this faerie world before that. Naomi asked me the other day: “But you really didn’t know anything about faeries at the time?”. Not at all. I was a teenager who grew up in Spain during the dictatorship of Franco, my country was still really unexposed to lots of cultural things that were happening in other countries such as USA and UK, so there was not such things in our lives. Of course, we had all the wonderful Disney movies who had been inspired by the Grim brothers and Arthur Rackham, and we also knew all the classic faerie tales by Hans Christian Andersen, but nothing about the real faerie world. My family comes from the mountains in the Basque Country but I never heard of any stories about the supernatural world.

So I firmly believe that with their book Brian Froud and Alan Lee recovered this sleeping culture from the past and brought it to the surface of the modern culture, and they did it the best possible way. Of course, I later discovered the work of Katharine Briggs, Arthur Rackham, and Edmund Dulac, but it was only thanks to them.

Now, once again, this new book by Froud made me experience the same feeling of magic than reading “Faeries” for the very first time. I remember reading this book at bed during the summer nights in the countryside, at the same location were a few years later some invisible presences started stealing objects from me and my friends, playing practical jokes on us by making them dissappear and appear back again. The faerie world of Brian Froud had took over my life and tough me how to love the countryside and nature, to realize how there is a world behind every tree, every rock, and every stream, further than we can see with our physical eyes. Ever since, I became a passionate of the woods, mountains and rivers, and today nature is one of the main inspirations for my own art. Today, I live in the countryside and my wife and I can’t survive without our weekly walks in the woods and the mountains.

On top of it, it has been an undescribable pleasure to me to discover such well taken care of product “World of Faerie” is. Just looking at this wonderful collection of detailed illustrations in a delightful edition featuring hidden booklets and first quality prints makes me feel I have a treasure in my hands. In the book, there is a little tribute where Brian Froud says: “Thank you Mr. Rackham, for reminding me that I live in a natural world inhabited by a personified consciousness; that I live in a world of Faerie”. Pharaphrasing his words, I want to say: “Thank you Mr. Froud”.

Posted in: Inspirational