Fairy Forest Painting

Good Wednesday morning Beloved Sentients. Today I am going to present my latest painting called “Fairy Forest 2025”. I was going to publish this post on Easter Sunday last weekend but was strangely again hacked out of my blog. I find this suspicious because the last time it happened was the day before the BC Provincial Election on October 19, 2024. So here we are less than a week before the Federal election and I was hacked out again. Luckily, my daughter-in-law came over for Easter Dinner and was able to get me back on. Stupidly, all I had to do was log in with the new password she gave me and wrote into my address book! So I was booted out again this morning and tried that simple trick lolololol. As my regular readers know I am woefully pathetic at technology.

Anyhooooo…..here is my painting which I started in 2022, a year after we moved to our cabin in the Malahat. I sketched it out for my grandchildren and then was overwhelmed with the size and detail of it…It’s about 8 paintings in one. So I left it on my easel in the studio.

The previous owner of this cabin was also an artist and he set up a REAL artist’s studio in a back room. To win the multiple bids to buy this cabin in May of 2021 I wrote the owner a letter to convince him I was the best purchaser. In that letter I told him I was an artist who wanted to teach arts and crafts to my two granddaughters. He chose us out of nine offers and when he moved out he left the studio it as he used it–complete with easel which you see in the photos. This is the first real easel I have ever owned and it was just left for me by a stranger I’ve never met. One of those great mysteries and gifts of life.

What follows is a series of photos showing the unfinished painting on the easel…then there’s a short video showing the unfinished painting. Then I have taken close-ups of the several “paintings within the painting”. Each one of these little paintings is symbolic of my family and depicts a person in my family circle.

Finally, there are a couple of photos of the painting as it is now framed [by my husband as always] and hung in our cabin living room over the bar which I had designed and had built for my husband for his 70th birthday.

Enjoy!

Unfinished painting on easel in studio

Video of unfinished painting in Studio…I thought the painting was finished at this point but soon realized that it needed a couple weeks more detail work…

Each butterfly in the painting depicts a deceased family member – This one is my two years older brother Murray who died in March 2021 of the Covid Protcol. I have written about him several times on this blog. Murray was a very handsome man who people thought looked like actor James Dean when he was a teenager.

The Wise Owl represents my oldest son – father of my granddaughters

Little Forest Fairy ‘Jack’ who was a pre-school romantic interest of my oldest granddaughter

Three rabbits on the trail to the lake – depict my Daughter-in-law and her two children. Mother rabbit is always alert and watchful for her children.

My eldest granddaughter as a fairy calling to her boyfriend ‘Jack.’ I gave the girls “elf ears” much to their delight.

My youngest granddaughter as a fairy sitting on a leaf. She likes the colour blue.

The butterfly sitting on the mushroom in the photo above represents my deceased younger brother Paul who died from the effects of five covid-19 injections–given to him without his informed consent–over a three year period. Paul had Down Syndrome and lived in a staffed residence. He died suddenly and unexpectedly of a stroke one year ago this week.

This slug in the forest is the computer avatar of my Daughter-in-Law who makes a very good living – supporting her family by working from home on her computer. When she loaded her movie avatar onto our TV so the girls could watch movies when they visited, I enjoyed seeing the little avatar so much I thought “What is a BC forest without a slug?!” and so painted it in at the last moment.

Painting completed, framed and hung over the bar in our cabin living room where it it lit up at night by the butterfly stained glass lamp. I used a lot of neon acrylic paints in this painting and so at night it is particularly magical with all the lamps in the painting actually glowing!

Close-up of the stained glass lamp and the wood carving of a forest fairy I did in 2018 back when we were living in Coquitlam and I belonged to a woodworking Studio. This favourite woodcarving of mine served as the overall inspiration for this painting.

Painting–now framed and hung over the bar in our living room.

Greencrow concludes: I finally finished this painting but, like all my paintings, it will never really be finished–because I can always see areas in it that need to be touched up. But at some point you need to walk away from a painting and move on.

I have been painting since I was in my mid teens. My father encouraged me and paid for me to go to art school for a year in Montreal. He thought I had great talent–but I told him I painted like ‘Grandma Moses’ [Google her] and that i did not want to spend my life trying to be ‘Grandma Moses’ and so chose another career [actually I chose several different careers]. But I have always painted and done other arts and crafts as an emotional outlet and as gifts for beloved friends. I never sell my work. My collection will be a legacy to my family…lol they can fight over who Won’t Have to hang it in their homes lolololol.

I know my work is rustic but I try to instill each artwork with symbolism to make up for the almost cartoon-like simplicity. I worked through a lot of grief and deep feelings in this painting–as well as expressing my love and joy for my family and, especially, my granddaughters.

Oh. I forgot to put a close up of the forest creatures that depict me and my husband. I will go back into the living room and take a photo of them now and add them at the end of this post. The one on the left is me–and the one on the right is my husband! Stay tuned.

Two crows in a tree – the one on the left is greencrow and the one on the right is my husband.