Things with Wings - Weed Wide Enough to Wrap a Fairy in.

Hello and a warm welcome to Magpieheaven, Followers and Friends. I have never entered a journal challenge before, but over the weekend I started a journal page that was something of a new departure for me and that just took over! Every available minute I returned to it to add a detail or some colour. I have done a journal page here and there before, but never anything that really was as therapeutic or - dare I say - as addictive as this! Because it is about 'things with wings' I should like to enter it in the Art Journal Journey, Things with Wings challenge here.

I hope it is acceptable as an entry because really it is just a huge doodle! When I was a teenager I would fill books with these doodles and they gave me such a sense of release. Last week had been tough so I started to doodle in my journal and I got so much pleasure from exploring this enchanted land of my own making! It's just black Pitt Pen and Inktense pencils with some stamped Red Lead labels clear embossed and tiny paper butterflies punched from card coloured with Distress Inks and misters, and some little hands I had drawn and scanned into my computer for doll making, collaged on.

Two things inspired me: A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare and the art of Richard Dadd, the famous painter of the fairy world. You can see examples here  http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/richard-dadd-130. His life was such a sad one, touched by mental illness, which was so little understood during his lifetime. A talented artist and reputed to be a kind and gentle person. he became mentally ill on a return from a drawing trip to the Middle East and in 1844, murdered his father. He spent a number of years in Broadmoor, painting and drawing. I was intrigued by his work when I first saw it in the 1970s and then when we moved to our present house, we discovered one of our neighbours had written a book on his work.

I don't possess the incredible skill of Dadd who can create the shape-changing world of 'things with wings' so that as we gaze through the undergrowth we start to discover that a whole culture of tiny folk exists under our noses: mischievous, not always benign and camouflaged by nature. 

Shakespeare, of course, creates just such a world in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' where after dark a forest becomes an enchanted place, where Queens can fall in love with donkeys and a tiny red flower squeezed on your eyes can make you fall hopelessly in love. I hope you can see that there are more things with wings than just the butterflies that have settled on the journal page.

But by the time my page was completed and the cardboard butterflies had settled down, I had so lost myself in the world of Fairy that my problems seemed far away. I had spent some time with the winged things on the Fairy Queen's grassy bank where

... sleeps Titania sometime of the night,

Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight.

And there the snake throws her enameled skin,

Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in...

Thank you for stopping by Magpieheaven today and looking at my journal page. I hope your week will be one full of creative enchantment.