Sandcastles Built in the Air

There are stretches that I spend so much time buried in the sanctuary of my basement artroom, the rest of the world seems to recede into a distant Renoir snapshot of life. People always ask me what is the hardest part about what I do and I invariably tell them, "the ideas". There is a quote that I like: "We don't pay artists for their work, we pay them for their ideas." All the talent in the world is dead, merely inert power, until it is electrified to life by imagination.

Ideas are the most difficult to conjure and be open to because they are the antithesis of everything we are taught. Creativity requires thought and insight; it is born of a shift in perspective, a step sideways. For me, that mindset is a place of being where all things are transformed and as I am a person that tends to be all or nothing, then I'm either in it, or I'm not. It is difficult to operate in the outside - the banal world - and maintain this glamoured perspective. There is only living your art and I've been particularly immersed in that world for weeks now. My mind is crammed with ideas such that I need to carry my idea book with me lest they laugh themselves away like whisps of psychadelic hooka smoke.

In short, I am loving my new books. They are so completely full of life and their own magical world that I can just envision them living in a fanstastical island library that rises like the glittering sun on the oceans of imagination. Rushing up onto the shores of our mind like a glistening castle on a foamy surf, and gone with the next tide.

Yes, there in a high room with tall windows, amidst an amazing collection of tomes, they shine from their shelves, each one containing inspired knowledge and song, poetry and stories. To open them is to be enchanted.


Two days hence is the Spring Fairy Festival and I'm looking forward to it, excited to take my little glammeries down from their vaulted shelves and into the world of man. Excited to get back into the Realm, to get my new wands out there, see how my inks go - hrm. I should make scent samples for that...(note to self)...

Some people are good at classical magic, others at earth magic. Me? I revel in the glamour, color, wonderous and dream-tastic. I love the bright shining.

"Let's be realistic: try the impossible." ~Ché Guevara