Carolin Leary Prinn, Beautiful Bizarre Artist Directory member provides some fascinating insights into her practice and experience as magical realist painter, as she responds to the questions below:
- If you had to choose only three words that you feel best describes your work, what would they be? And why?
- Many things inundate our daily lives. What role do you feel art and the artist still have in today’s society?
- If you could collaborate with any artist, dead or alive, who would it be with and why?
- What do you think is the single most important piece of advice you have been given as an artist?
If you had to choose only three words that you feel best describes your work, what would they be? And why?
Mythical, Ethereal, Symbolic
My work surrounds a mythical world I have been creating since I was a child called The Islands of Niljora. Like many myths, it plays out in a cyclical nature of creations and endings, and my tales and artwork are woven into this map. My art also has a mythical sensibility to it – hero’s journeys, deities and trials of the spirit play out in the adventures and narratives of my work – exploring the how’s and why’s of life. I have always loved mythology as well as folklore and fairy tales since I was very young. So I use these concepts and allegorical ideas intuitively, sometimes referencing existing myths and other times inventing my own.
My work has always had a very ethereal and dreamlike nature to it. The characters feel like spirits, dancing in from another realm, here to carry out their various symbolic adventures. This aspect must be influenced by my love of fairy tales growing up, and a lot of the delicately beautiful golden age illustration that went with it. I recall loving the tale of “The Garden of Paradise” and imagining these glittering gardens where the pebbles of the waters shone like jewels, phoenixes flew about and the fruit tasted sweet as the heavens. Tales from “1001 Nights” to “East of The Sun and West of The Moon” speak of journeys to magical lands, with spirits and striking figures depicted in their graceful, silken and light as feather costumes. These depictions have certainly lent an ethereal quality to my own works and characters, who have left this world to play and dance in realms that are otherworldly, dreamlike and filled with beauty.
My third word would be symbolic. Animals, natural elements and objects conjure up something in us that is innate. Symbols vary from culture to culture, but many share a common thread, and it is these I find most interesting. They have helped form the personal symbolism I use in my work. I have also always had a fascination with the ancient drawings left behind from various civilisations – I love the mystery behind them as they seem to possess their own secret symbology or magical nature to them. From here I think I developed my habit of leaving all sorts of hints to my stories, symbols and pictographs on the stones and ruins you find in my works.
Many things inundate our daily lives. What role do you feel art and the artist still have in today’s society?
There is a reason we all flock to museums and cities that were created beautifully and call it a dream. We feel differently in these spaces and wish to be surrounded by it, because it uplifts us. If I have a difficult day and go to a museum, a symphony or look through a book of my favourite illustrations, there is nothing like this beauty to lift my worries away. Art, in its many forms, carries us beyond our earthly concerns. It speaks to our hearts and conjures our dreams. Perhaps because I have been travelling a lot in my life, I find I am always seeking something that connects us. In its universal language, though every culture imbues its own particular flavour, I find that art is something that ties us together.
If you could collaborate with any artist, dead or alive, who would it be with and why?
I cannot seem to choose between John Howe and Alan Lee. I have been looking at books by the two illustrators since I was in university and they still fill my heart with joy. The way they depicted Tolkien’s world in particular gave me so much motivation and a wish to design my own world with a sense of completeness and beauty. The worlds they create seem to hold their own histories, every detail covered, and this is something I really admire. In each of their own distinct styles, I can see they have this inner knowledge of the trees and landscapes that their imaginative work settles into, and the result is something that makes the fantasy come to life – I am convinced it is someplace in the world that exists but I just haven’t been yet. To collaborate with these artists, and converse with them about their work, would be a dream.
What do you think is the single most important piece of advice you have been given as an artist?
Where I am right now, I think back to my mentor in New Zealand who encouraged me to start publishing my books. I always had it in my mind that I would publish this one book, and that I would be sure of its perfection before doing so and that necessarily this would be in several decades. He was right that I would have waited forever. It has ended up being a good idea that I started small, releasing some of the tales at a time in compilations. I think it has even added this element of mystery and discovery to my world (The Islands of Niljora) that is meant to be the very nature of it. Also, I think we never really feel ready when we present something to the world. I have learned so much making my first two books and I think I will continue to learn with each new book I create. Sure, I still have an epic tome that awaits its moment, but the way I will create it has developed and matured from experience.
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