Hatchlings
Gouache, 15.8 x 22.7 inches, 2001.
'Hatchlings' - newly-hatched fairies - painting by Nancy Farmer
I spent too long looking at butterflies... Actually I really did, as there was a butterfly house in Syon Park, just down the road from where I used to live. You could go in there and these huge tropical things just flapped lazily about... and landed on my brightly coloured hair quite often, walked about a bit on my head, discovered to their disappointment that I was not a tropical flower, and took off again. They were heavy, for butterflies... And they seemed to prefer it when my hair was pink, to when it was blue.
I completely failed to draw them, even though I used to take a sketchbook and they sat quite still a lot, but what I thought were most fascinating were the chrysalises - there was always a box of them hatching. So this picture came as no surprise. Fairies, clearly, hatch from fairy chrysalises. Of course this throws open the possibility of whether there is perhaps a larval stage - fairy caterpillars... and then one is into the even more bizarre territory of fairy egg-laying, and whether the caterpillars might need to be breast-fed. It has been suggested that I think too much about these things, but I did sketch an idea for a fairy queen who was a big fat thing like a queen bee, that needed to be constantly fed by a team of worker-fairies. It hasn't come to anything yet, but there is still time...
The counter-point to 'Hatchlings' was 'Eggshells' - which was a picture of hatching angels, coming out of eggs, like birds. This ended up as a rather dark disturbing piece, though, rather unlike Hatchlings. Click the thumbnail to see it.