A thing of beauty is a joy forever, or so John Keats (1795–1821) stated in the opening stanza of his poem Endymion (1818). While the line is well-known, its”meaning in relation to the story of the shepherd Endymion and his complicated love life is rather more obscure. In fact, when you consider exactly what is meant by that opening line, you must wonder if anything should be a joy forever.

Before I get to Keats, I should mention that during the 19th century, the name Endymion was famous because of the book of the same name by Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, a former prime minister and best-selling novelist, beloved by the public for his romanticism, which often came with a political edge. When he published his final novel Endymion in 1880, the newspapers wrote that “first class passengers, especially ladies, carry it with them as they would a favorite pug or a flask of fluid refreshment.” In Disraeli’s novel, Endymion is the son of a disgraced politician, determined to redeem the family name by becoming a politician for the other side. Disraeli’s hero is good, virtuous, and ultimately successful, with the book ending on his assent to prime minister. The connection to the poem is purely superficial, but the name is used to denote goodness and love together with a sense of renewal and revitalization. You could also guess that for the young women clasping the book as they traveled, it was a joy until the last page, if not forever.

The wellspring of the name, well known to Disraeli, was obviously the poem. Keats based his work on the Greek myth of the beautiful shepherd on the slopes of Mount Latmus, named Endymion. From the various retellings, the shepherd was possibly also a prince and an astronomer, but what we can agree on is that he was so handsome that celestial beings placed him into an eternal sleep so they could worship him forever. Licymnius of Chios, an ancient Greek poet, told the story that Hypnos, the god of sleep, loved the shepherd so much that he cast his spell over him with the caveat that Endymion’s eyes remained open so Hypnos could gaze into them eternally. Mercifully, Keats told the marginally less creepy version of the myth, in which the slumbering beauty is visited by the goddess of the moon, Selena (or Cynthia as she is known in this poem). To the relief of all viewers of the art created from said myth, Endymion’s eyes remain closed.

In the traditional myth, Selena, the Titan goddess of the moon, fell deeply in love with the beautiful shepherd and begged Zeus, another of her lovers, to grant Endymion eternal youth so that the shepherd would always be with her. The goddess should have known never to trust Zeus, a tricksy devil at the best of times and one with a grudge in the case of our pretty shepherd. Turns out Endymion had also been the object of desire for Hera, Zeus’s wife/sister, and so Zeus chose to interpret the plea from Selena in a malicious manner. Instead of making Endymion immortal, he put the shepherd into an eternal sleep, preserving his beauty in a permanently unconscious manner.

Not that I’m one to speak in defense of Zeus, but he is not the only one to be petty in this myth. A lesser-known story connected to Endymion is that a girl called Muia found the sleeping shepherd and took a shine to him. He was a great listener, so she would sit and talk to him every night and her endless chatter disturbed his celestial sleep, which is quite a talent. This infuriated Selena so much that she turned the girl into a fly, doomed to annoy sleepers forever with her irritating buzzing. There are no romantic art depictions of this particular myth, unfortunately, so Selena’s shady past can be overlooked on this occasion.

When artists portrayed this poetic love story, the emphasis was always on the gorgeous supine shepherd, his beauty shimmering in the moonlight. Above him, sighing and longing, leans Selena, gazing upon the man she loves who will never gaze back. Anne-Louis Girodet’s 1791 painting The Sleep of Endymion shows a remarkably naked shepherd in all his glory, snoozing under a bush while a chubby child, presumably Eros, parts the branches so the silvery fingertips of moonlight can caress his splendid form. By the time of Jerome-Martin Langlois’s 1822 interpretation, Selena had taken an equally naked shape and is seen floating down on the beams of moonlight to get a closer look at the sleeping beauty with Eros helpfully lifting his blanket. Mercifully, Eros is missing from later paintings as his presence feels both a little unnecessary and rather weird. I’m sure the goddess can sneak a peek under the blanket on her own. By Victor Pollet’s work of 1854, Selena gazes upon the object of her desire alone, her body as pale as the crescent moon that cradles her. Endymion, covered by the smallest piece of animal fur, his shepherd’s crook clutched in his hand, remains an object of glory, the personification of perfection.

Another reason for the departure of Eros from the scene might be an extension of the myth where the moon goddess not only gazed upon her slumbering love but physically visited him every night, giving birth to fifty children by him, which is a little excessive. A magical interpretation appeared in John Atkinson Grimshaw’s 1879 Endymion on Mount Latmus, where Selena, fluttering like a fairy, glows above the object of her desire. It could be that the goddess is departing her love in the glow of the rising sun, curving her body to get a last look at his face, clutching her heart as she is banished by the day.

This rather lustier attraction becomes apparent in later depictions, such as Edward Poynter’s 1902 painting showing Selena skipping down from the sky to find her lover sleeping among the poppies, which denote his endless slumber. A year later, George Frederick Watts painted Selena as a swirling cloud engulfing her lover, creating a circle along with his golden sleeping form. The spirit of the goddess seems to enter the slumbering shepherd, who echoes her body above him, and they appear to form two halves of a whole. They become the phases of the moon together, symbolic of the time passing and the goddess’s love renewing eternally.

The tale of Endymion, the sleeping shepherd, adored in his unconsciousness, is remarkable for the passivity of the male protagonist. Our hero is eternally snoozing because a goddess wanted to possess him. His best qualities are being submissive, silent, and decorative—talents usually required of heroines and yet this feminization of a hero is accepted as a triumph and the pinnacle of romance. There is also a reflection of nature and its joyful cycles. You can interpret Selena’s swooping down to Endymion every night as the lowering of the moon so that the sun can rise, as his name may be derived from the Greek word for “to dive into.” Thus Endymion’s power is to tempt the moon down every night so that the sun can rise and day can come again. In that way, his beauty is his power, keeping the world turning even from his endless sleep. Likewise, Selena’s love is not destructive like that of some of her fellow immortals, but revives each night, new and passionate, to last forever.

We all know the cottage. The one in the story, the one where the witch lives. It sits east of the sun and west of the moon, a stone’s throw away from a glass mountain and a quick trot from the hollow tree where three dogs howl. It’s a place of boundaries and limits and risk, the beginning and end of the story, time out of time. That cottage.

And the witch makes it … cozy? Petite, anyway. Maybe even miniature.

A dollhouse, with or without humanlike figures inside. It always looks as if she just stepped out for a second. She’ll be back before you know it, with some marvel hidden in her pocket.

We all know the witch too. She’s better than her reputation. She is a healer, most likely; a reader, certainly. Her shelves are as crowded with books as her rafters are thick with bunches of drying herbs. Or maybe (additionally?) she is a temptress and a goddess of wrath, the one who builds a home out of candy and cake and then calls us rude for tearing it to bits and stuffing our faces. Or she’s a doddering old grandma waiting innocently for her red-caped granddaughter to show up with some lunch.

Which witch is yours? Where does she live? Does she prefer to sleep in a cozy cupboard bed or a wrought-iron cot? What fills her cauldron, her nightstand, her étagère?

Yes, of course witches have étagères. They need the shelves for their supplies and the objets d’art et de vertu they bring back from their travels. One broomstick can carry a girl pretty far in a night—over the seas, maybe, or back in time about a hundred years or so.

My witch is a time traveler. She also adores tiny things. She’s a friend to the bats, and of course she loves cats (and occasional rhymes). She grows flowers for the bees and bakes cakes just because.

If I talk about her as I would a friend, it’s because to me she is Real.

Enchanted Reality

A miniaturist craves two reactions: Wow, how did you make that? And Wow, that looks Real!

When a mini lover tells you that something seems “real,” they’re talking about way more than verisimilitude. Let’s capitalize it: What’s Real is a feeling, a vibe, a je ne sais quoi that connects with the Beyond and the creator in all of us.

The Real is the otherworldly rush I get from gazing into a scene. I let my eyes go soft and a little blurry. I breathe deeply and remind myself to relax. And then I forget what size I am. I also forget the year, the date, and where I’m standing—I melt into the setting. I get to live in that suspended moment, get a taste of what it would be like to be Mary, Queen of Scots, in hiding (for example). Or the wisewoman who bandages the dragon queen’s wounds and helps her live to fight another day. Or the childless crone who watches from a window while a couple of waifs pick at the walls of her cottage and swallow gobbets of marzipan and chocolate from the place where she lives.

Just for a moment, let’s not call this Real thing a dollhouse. I prefer the term domestic sculpture. We’re talking about art on a finicky scale, a magic of transformation.

No surprise, miniaturists are wisewomen and witches themselves. We are crafty repurposers and makers of arcane little doodads that puzzle our partners and give our familiars something to bat around the floor. We are Borrowers, à la the mini people in the Mary Norton novels, taking things from the big world and making them Real. We fashion stonework out of egg cartons and thatched roofs out of faux fur; we cut up our clothes to stitch crazy quilts. And please don’t invite us to play chess. The temptation is too great—queens and knights make lovely statuary, and a pawn is a fabulous pedestal to prop up a polymer-clay sink. You would be wise to at least ask us to empty our pockets before we leave.

“I actually feel it when an item has a history—a soul, if you will,” says my friend Mark, who is building a vast Georgian mansion, one room at a time. Whether the sense of history comes from the age of the object itself (vintage is huge in the tiny world) or from the parts having done duty as something else, nostalgia helps to create a connection to a world he is both reproducing and correcting in perfect little scenes.

Mini Reality and the Fine Arts

Some of the world’s great museums display miniaturism as fine art. Denmark’s National Museum has collected over a hundred antique domestic sculptures,

and in Holland you’d probably have a hard time finding a museum that doesn’t feature a dollhouse. In the U.S., the mini capital is Chicago, where you’ll find both the Thorne miniature rooms and Colleen Moore’s fairy castle. Both deliver a Real rush, but they do it in different ways.

The Thorne rooms—a few more of which are displayed in Phoenix, a few in Knoxville, Tennessee—are the gold standard for letter-perfect reality. Narcissa Niblack Thorne was a collector and design historian whose husband was an heir to the Montgomery Ward estate.

With a bit of that five-and-dime fortune, she commissioned over one hundred of the world’s swankiest and most accurate representations of historical settings from the late 1200s to the 1940s, sixty-eight of which are now housed at the Art Institute of Chicago. Launching her project during the Depression of the 1930s, Thorne hired out-of-work artisans, designers, and fine artists to re-create great interiors from Europe, Asia, and North America: We curtsey in a gilded French salon from 1780, or we pull up a square chair in a New Mexican dining room from 1940, its white fireplace carefully shaded to show smoke damage. Admire the cubist paintings in a tiny California hallway.

You can’t help walking away from the Thorne rooms with some morsel of historical knowledge. So Thorne’s labor of love completes the mission of the Dutch baby houses of the 1500s and beyond.

Usually a tall cabinet with shelves divided into rooms, the baby house was a teaching tool: Little girls were meant to learn about housekeeping by caring for their mini rooms. (For a trip back in time to see such a house, read or watch The Miniaturist.) Almost all of the rooms are in 1:12 scale, which means that one inch of a miniature scene equals one foot of real life—the most common scale for mini creations. The same proportions suit the miniature hyperreal in Randy Hage’s faithfully gritty renderings of decaying storefronts in the New York City area—club CBGB, for example, and a favorite delicatessen, a mom-and-pop grocery. You’ll never see anything more realistically Real; you might even find that IRL seems dull and imprecise after you sink into the miniaturist trance.

As proof that a domestic sculpture doesn’t have to be realistic to feel Real, a few miles away from the Thorne rooms, you can visit a twelve-foot-high fairy castle. This is the brainchild of actress Colleen Moore, who took her dark-eyed gamine charm off to Hollywood in the 1920s to cavort across the silver screen as a flapper. The moment you see her creation, you simply fall in love; you become a different person, a more hopeful, heart-glad sort of fairy (or witch). It’s a glittering marvel that took seven years and $500,000 to make.

In contemporary currency, that’s a cost of more than $9 million—but the skills to make such a magnum opus don’t exist anymore, so, you know, priceless.

Moore was known to hand over her own personal jewels and ask that they be turned into the back of a mini chair, or maybe a diamond and emerald chandelier. Her undersea-themed library holds tiny books (usually a few lines of text spread over several pages) signed by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise), Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), Agatha Christie (At Bertram’s Hotel), and Daphne du Maurier (Rebecca). The astonishing confection is now on display in the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry.

The fact that these houses have a place in museums means they are continuing to educate. Through them we learn what a household is; we see how different countries and eras defined it. Architectural styles, members of the family, members of the staff, the marriage of beautiful things with practical ones. And the element of fantasy in creating a home.

My mini chum Vicky Brandt used to visit Moore’s fairy castle when she was in grade school. “I would just stand there on a stool and stare,” she says. Now she makes historical miniatures and doll clothes. “I am in control of the little world I create,” she says. “That is totally opposite to the reality we live in.”

Who needs full-size reality? I’ll take a fairy castle, a cubist painting, and one of Vicky’s frocks any day. And this song, “Garden Below, Garden Above,” written by Timothy Bailey of Timothy Bailey and the Humans during the Covid pandemic:
You held her and she spoke to you
She loves you in a miniature room, a miniature room
You live inside of the house she’s made
Outside, calamity, but inside it’s safe.

Into a Great Big Beyond

Each diminutive setting is a gesture toward something so big that it boggles the mind. Call it Art or Imagination, Beauty or the Eternal; by any name, it is a magic carpet ride into another mind, a time machine, a way of connecting to whatever in us is eternally human: our imagination.

Most of us can’t afford Thorne and Moore or Hage-level brands of transcendence, but we can and do keep pushing to think of ways to repurpose things that already exist in our lives.

So the stolen chess piece does become a garden statue, a bottle cap a mixing bowl, a dental floss dispenser the back of a sleek modern toilet.

We love kits. Especially those of us with no saw or knife skills: We’ll take the factory-milled walls and clever towers, yes, please! We might get out a Dremel and cut new holes for windows, maybe kit-bash a couple of things together and change a Victorian manor into a Castle Rackrent. To make the cottage pictured on the next page, I used a very basic kit that I bought years ago. I didn’t bash anything into it (such a term!), but I did change the precut holes to accommodate Gothic windows and a door, then filled in the extra space in the corners with balsa wood and spackle. (Remember how I said I don’t have good saw or knife skills? Not a lie.) I used joint compound to get a plaster effect on the interior walls. The wood floor started out as a $4 box of coffee stirrers that I stained four different colors, then glued down on a piece of cardboard patchworked together from old envelopes.

For every fancy, swanky, amazingly Real and incredibly expensive mini manor-castle-cottage out there, you can be sure there are dozens of makers who are doing something similar with unusual materials—meaning trash—and the castoffs of full-scale modern life. If you can’t afford the stone siding made by a high-end materials company, you can certainly afford to make your own using cardboard egg cartons, as I did here. (I think it looks more Real than what you can buy anyway, and it’s easy and fun.) You don’t even have to eat eggs; when I posted a wish for a few egg cartons, my neighbors started dropping them off by the dozen. If you are my neighbor, I’ll be happy to share, because miniaturism is also about community and joy.

The Scary Side of Tiny

But. Right. You say you happen to know somebody who loathes miniatures in all forms, who always refused to play with dollhouses and dolls themselves, even shudders at the tiny toothpaste tube that comes in a motel’s convenience pack. This person probably can’t put the feeling into words other than “creepy.” They find the Thorne rooms “creepy”! He says your sweet little cottage gives him the willies!

She refuses to let herself relax into the dreamy appreciation of things miniature!

That is, perhaps, the problem: the allure of small things, small worlds, that feel Real and yet aren’t quite real, not to our scale. They make us question ourselves and our selves and our place in the universe.

In his “Essay on the ‘Uncanny,’” Sigmund Freud described the unsettling effect of doppelgangers, simulacra, and reproductions quite simply: They make us unsure about what we call life. Amid so much that is Real but not alive, how do you know that you are alive? And that the doll who might inhabit your sculpture is not? Such questions can keep you up at night, I’ll admit.

So maybe it’s natural that there are so many miniaturists who celebrate Halloween all year long. They specialize in haunted houses and witches’ lairs. Is there anything more uncanny and disturbing than a ghost living in a dollhouse? Well, your leery friend could point out, every dollhouse is haunted—at very least by childhood ideas and games that linger long after the dollhouse stops being a plaything or an educational tool.

I imagine a tiny lady in a stiff gray frock, passing from floor to floor without a staircase, weeping for what she has lost … What has she lost? Does she need help? And what sorts of experiences has my time-traveling witch had that I’ll never share?

I give my witch all my best treasures and plans, souvenirs from the places I’ve been and even the places I want to go.

I give her some books I love and others I want to read. Her cottage is my diary and day planner.

What we see in a domestic sculpture might be Real and recognizable, but it isn’t entirely little-r real. No matter how meticulous the mini work is, we know there will be some little detail that jars you, something that seems wrong.

The thickness of the writing on a jar of eye of newt, for example: From the perspective of a 1:12 person, it looks like a spluttery attempt by a kindergartner.

Most commonly, we notice that our fabrics are all far too thick to move properly in curtains, carpets, bed hangings; even all the geniuses of the Thorne rooms can’t quite make the drapes look entirely real.

And that can be alarming. Maybe we were just about to surrender to the illusion and live imaginatively (as I truly believe I could) as a miniature person in a wistful Gothic cottage, but then we see that the small world is different. Ordinary reality whooshes in and plucks us back.

I, for one, would love to rid myself of that reality.

The miniature world beckons. How far in you let yourself enter is between you and your psyche.

“All the things real people couldn’t have”

As Colleen Moore said when she was planning her spectacular fairy castle in the midst of the Great Depression, “We’ll have to think of all the things real people couldn’t have.” That’s the purpose of miniaturism: making what’s impossible in the real world into a deeper Reality, using whatever comes to hand.

In the Thorne collection, each roombox hints at a vaster world. A door opens into another room, barely glimpsed, or a dramatically curved staircase; a window offers a hint of tantalizing view. You think, This could be my room, if only I could shrink down …

Which world is Real and which simply real?

Build the cottage.

Be the witch.

Blodeuwedd (2023), by J. Adam McGalliard Oil on canvas

We’re thrilled to feature this year’s winner of the special Enchanted Living Award in the Art Renewal Center’s 17th International ARC Salon: J. Adam McGalliard’s Blodeuwedd. (Find out more about the competition at artrenewal.org.) Of course we had to ask the artist about the piece, his process, and his secret to staying enchanted!

Enchanted Living: What fascinates you and what inspires you?
J. Adam McGalliard: I’m really drawn to old stories like myths, fairy tales, the kind of narratives that have been passed down for centuries because they touch something deep in us. I love painting figures who are caught between different worlds or in moments of change. There’s something about characters who carry both strength and fragility that really speaks to
me. My inspiration comes from all over the place, from books I’m reading, time spent in nature, even dreams that stick with me. I’m always looking for that feeling that there’s something magical just under the surface of ordinary life.

EL: How did Blodeuwedd come about?
JAM: I’ve been fascinated by her story for years. In Welsh mythology, Blodeuwedd is a woman made from flowers, conjured by two male magicians to be the obedient wife of a man cursed never to marry a human. She wasn’t born, she was constructed, built to serve someone else’s needs with no say in the matter. But then she chooses something for herself. She falls in love with another man and tries to escape the life that was forced on her, and for that, she’s condemned. People often focus on the idea of betrayal, but what draws me in is the courage of claiming selfhood, of refusing to accept what isn’t right. I wanted to paint her not as a cautionary tale but as someone fierce and defiant, reclaiming her autonomy in the face of control.

EL: Can you explain the painting and what it signifies?
JAM: I painted her in a moment of transformation. She’s still connected to the nature and spell she was created from, but she’s also breaking away from it. You can see the flowers and intertwining roots are both part of her body and something she’s emerging from. It’s meant to capture that tension between what we’re made to be and who we choose to become. The flowers are beautiful, but they’re also a kind of prison. I wanted that duality to come through, the beauty and the danger, the stillness and the change happening all at once.

EL: And finally, how do you stay enchanted?
JAM: For me, it’s in the everyday work of making art, those long, quiet hours in the studio when I’m completely absorbed in what I’m doing. I take my dog on walks every morning too. I live in a historic area with lots of trees and small parks, and there’s something about being in those spaces that draws me back to the same myths and stories, many of which are nature-centered. These places that I’ve seen hundreds of times always show me something new. It’s not always this grand, magical feeling. Sometimes it’s just the satisfaction of noticing how light falls across a patch of grass or a certain angle of an old oak tree. Staying open to those small moments of wonder is where the magic lives for me.

See more of McGalliard’s work at mcgalliard.net or visit him on Instagram @adammcgalliard.

We’ve long been fans of the art of Pantovola, which is wildly varied: She’s a textile artist, doll maker, and painter, sometimes all at once, but always a strange, mesmerizing mix of delicate, haunting, and unbelievably lovely. For this issue, we focused on her art that features cottages—sweet little homes with spirits emerging from the chimney stacks and ghosts escaping from the teapots and transparent wolves flying past the windows … We asked her about these visions in a recent conversation.

Enchanted Living: Can you tell us a little bit about you? Where do you live and work? What fascinates you and inspires you?

Anouk Pantovola: My name is Anouk Pantovola, and I’m a visual artist working under the name Pantovola. I’ve lived and worked in many places in Europe, currently in Barcelona. Creating is what defines me and is really essential to how I experience life and the world around me. I have always, since I could hold a pencil, made worlds to live in with drawing, painting, puppetry, and miniature theater. The imaginary, the magical—this is what I always search for in everyday life through making art. I have a special love for the theater, especially puppetry theater. The animated object, the puppet that comes alive through our imagination, is what moves me.

EL: Can you tell us about the ghostly figures that inhabit your work? We love them!

AP: The ghostly figures come from my love for the ethereal, the otherworldly realm, that which the eye cannot quite see, the dusky place where creatures live that we cannot quite know or understand. Graveyards are places I always love to visit— the older, the more abandoned, the better. The way nature takes over our manmade structures, the silence, the stillness of these small worlds, gives me a deep sense of peace and almost of belonging.

As a child I created shadow theaters with cutout figures behind Japanese paper—witches, animals, trees. I was moved by the figurines that appeared only in the dark as silhouettes against the flickering flame of the candle. Later on, the ghost became a beloved theme in my work: not quite here, not quite there; half in this world, half in the next.

The Chimney Ghost was my first ghostly sculpture, where the ghost appeared as a smoke-like figure rising from the chimney of a cottage. A little later on, these ghosts started to inhabit teapots.

EL: This issue is about cottage witchcraft, and we’re showcasing some of your images that center around home and nature. How does this theme resonate with you?

AP: This idea of “home” is something that really fascinates me from a personal perspective, in the sense that I’ve always tried to feel “at home” in this world.

I’m deeply nostalgic and sometimes it seemed to me that I was always chasing a memory or a trace of a sense of “home.” I’ve tried to capture that feeling with rituals, by scent, by sound. They’ve always been attempts to grasp something more complex that I didn’t quite understand until recently. The only place I do always feel completely at home is in nature. This is for the obvious reason that nature is our natural home, the home we’ve abandoned and traded for manmade structures.

EL: And how do you stay enchanted in your everyday life?

AP: Creating magical objects with everyday objects like teapots makes me look at the world around me in a more enchanted way. Now when I’m in the city and see a teapot somewhere in a shop, I cannot help but imagine … But also by looking at the way nature grows and evolves, in the big and the small. Paying attention to the small creatures living their lives around us. Or the way the late-evening sun hits the surface of the water in the pond. Finding the hidden entrances in the trunk of the old tree in the park, knowing that is where they live, of course! Because faeries live in our imaginations, and that in itself makes them real, because the imagination is as real as the door in the house is real.

See more of Pantovola’s art at pantovola.com or on Instagram @pantovola.art.

Artist Anna Stead, a.k.a. Thistlemoon, was born in London, raised in Worcestershire, and moved to the Cotswolds in 2016. She and her husband, two children, and two cats live there now in a little house on the very edge of a small town surrounded by fields and woods.

The charming landscape of her adopted home, with its “quiet wildness,” is a huge inspiration for her drawing, she says. In every field there’s deep-rooted history and folklore that can be explored and appreciated; she loves “seeking out the mysterious little corners in our landscape,” and these sweet details, ranging from abbey ruins to a spray of inkcap mushrooms, inhabit her art. She’s long been captivated by all things rooted in mystery, magic, and the past: those castle ruins, the secret paths into forests, stories about elves and wizards. A love for fantasy, myth, and history, as well as a deep connection with nature, inform and incite almost everything she creates. “At the moment I’m very inspired by ancient landmarks,” she says, “and have embarked on a project of drawing detailed maps!”

She’s known among friends and family for her love of trinkets and oddities, as well as collecting little pieces from her travels such as stones, moss, dried plants, and feathers. She has a particular fondness for owls, moons, and mushrooms, not to mention the exceedingly Tolkien-esque Tyn Llan Welsh pottery. As a result, you’ll find all manner of witchy little objects in any corner of her home.

No matter how far-flung her imaginings, she manages to stay grounded. Her workspace is in her “cozy little kitchen with doors out to our garden,” which she tries to keep open to let in lots of nature’s fresh air and soothing sounds. Her other essentials for a day of fantastical drawing are a “sweet cup of coffee, burning candles, and a cuddle from my most snuggly cat, Merlin.” Which sounds like the best way to work, in our opinion.

See more of Stead’s work at thistlemoon.co.uk or visit her on Instagram @thistlemoon.

Feature Image;
Handmade glass vases by Evan Chambers Objects

It is coming on fast: one of the year’s most magical moments, a gossamer bubble of time entranced within the ordinary. And so you plan a soirée that will radiate for the solstice. You’ll celebrate light and lightness among shadows in a backyard meadow packed with daisies.

Think a bit like a daisy yourself, perhaps like Gatsby’s dashing flapper Daisy Buchanan, who is famous for asking, “Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it.” Your interest is the year’s shortest night. You won’t miss a minute.

You plan to begin as the daisies close their petals at dusk and end when they open again in the light. In between, diaphanous dresses will swirl through the brief hours of darkness; iridescent glassware and beads will shimmer in light from the sunset, candles, bonfire, twinkle lights, dawn. The gossamer is an ineffable extra element, the almost-not-there that reminds us not to simply look through the light, the water, the air—everything we would ordinarily call invisible and intangible—but to look at them. Touch them. Even air can take on body and substance. In its strict definition, the word gossamer refers to a loose weave of very thin fabric, like the cotton gauze with which it might share etymology (goss-amer, gauze).

Or it can refer to that thin, shimmery film that covers things like spiderwebs. But when have things gossamer ever been strict? The term is about expansion and release, shining light and being light—meaning both brightness and almost-weightlessness. It can gather all the senses and spin them into a cloud of synesthesia, so touch and vision become the same experience, sounds have a taste, colors have smells, and light and lightness entwine everywhere.

You probably need a few things, which means you have a most delightful mission to complete. It could start with a dragonfly wing or a peacock feather you find on a walk. Then a trip to the flea market, the thrift store, a friend’s attic, even a rare maybe-this-time visit to a fancy antiques mall and art gallery as you hunt for a blue glass bowl that color-shifts and shimmers as you fill it with flowers. And a veil of lace, a linen chemise, a silk dress.

You’ll honor time itself when you bring in a few special somethings to transform your space … and perhaps even yourself. The gossamer glints from the shadows or floats down from above, light as air. It is, most of all, what surprises us. A Look at Light From Both Sides Now Iridescence, for example, always seems to catch us off guard.

A damselfly’s glassy wing is all but invisible against the light as it wavers past to a riverbank and then settles in with a mere gleam of icy blue. Or a serendipitous bubble floats away, swirling pink and blue, when you set down your bottle of dish soap. The wing and the bubble contain a gossamer secret. They are transparent and almost colorless in themselves, but we still see color on them, and the color moves and changes according to the angle from which we see.

Our eyes perceive color and shimmer because we’re looking at two nearly invisible layers, and they make light start to fight itself. Most of what we see, we see because it reflects light: Light hits the object and bounces back from the surface, sending information about shape and color back to us. With transparent or translucent objects, we might also see by refraction—meaning that a wave of light enters the object and is bent or redirected, as in a prism.

This happens a lot with glass, including crystals cut especially for the job, but it’s more common elsewhere than it might sound at first. Take that errant soap bubble. It’s a sphere with air at the core, enclosed by an extremely thin wall of water with a smidge of glycerol (about one-tenth the thickness of a single hair), wrapped again by the air.

When light hits the bubble, some of it stops at the outside layer and some makes it through to the back of that very thin wall. So we see it bouncing off two surfaces at once. And the angles send different color signals; in true scientific parlance, they then “interfere” with each other—basically, they fight, and we get the rapidly shifting colors we love. Finally, the layer of water is under constant pressure from the air inside and out, so its thickness never stops changing—which produces the movement that activates the shimmer … until, eventually, the bubble bursts. When you study a clear insect wing, too, you’re looking at outside and inside at the same time. The wing is composed of two layers of chitin, the same tough, translucent material that makes up your fingernails. As a damselfly or dragonfly hovers, you perceive light bouncing off both layers, and the waves interfere with each other again.

Ordinary flies’ wings do the same trick. So why don’t all transparent insect wings shimmer in this way? Actually, they do, according to a coterie of researchers. About fifteen years ago, one group suddenly realized that they’d been looking at insect wings all wrong. When a scientist holds one up to the light, she tends to study the veins between colorless layers of chitin. When she lowers that wing and takes a moment to let a light shine on it, she understands magic.

Light interference also puts a faint shine to the transparent wings of grasshoppers. And cockroaches. And fairies. It excites the eye and inspires the heart.

Feature Image:
A Scene From ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (1873)Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

When fairy fever struck the Victorians, they never recovered. Many would say thank goodness for that, as this fever created some of the most beautiful art to float gently on the breezes of the 19th century, art that still captures our imagination today. One of the most impactful yet mysteriously unknown proponents of this fashion for fae was a modest young artist from the southwest of England. This is the story of John Simmons (1823–1876).

“By the time Simmons found his forte in fairyland, it had already been in fashion for over a decade. On stage and canvas, Shakespeare was always a commercial favorite, and The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream fit the fashion for the supernatural. At the end of the previous century, fantasy artist Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) produced influential and popular illustrations for a folio of the Bard’s plays that enabled them to be reproduced and sold to a greater audience. His classical yet raucous images of Titania and Bottom paved the way for a genre of art that could be literary and still pleasingly nude. This foreshadowed what was to follow in the 19th century’s years of fairies, with artists such as Richard Dadd, who offered his interpretation of midsummer madness with Puck from 1841 and Contradiction: Oberon and Titania from 1854–58.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream also held sway on the stage, delighting audiences during this period. Its poetic language, lack of tragedy, and fantasy elements lifted audiences from the industrial modern world they inhabited. Samuel Phelps’s production at Sadler’s Wells in 1853 used layers of green and blue gauze to create a dreamlike separation from fairyland, close to us but still beyond our grasp. Opera singer and producer Lucia Elizabeth Vestris (1797–1856) drew her audience into fairyland in her 1840 revival of the play at Covent Garden, using flittering lights around the theater to suggest the fairies when Oberon proclaimed that they “through the house give glimmering light.” With her background not only in grand opera but also in burlesque, Vestris also knew how to tread the fine line between fairy costume and scantily clad scandal, which would become pertinent in the paintings that followed.

This experience with the fantasy of fairyland and the human yearning for it drew artists to create canvases that brought this specific Shakespeare play to an artistic audience. The plays beguiled the public, but more importantly, they ensnared the imagination of artists, drawing them deeper into this world. John Simmons had been a portrait and miniature artist, making a modest living in Bristol, in the crevice of Southwest England, across the water from Wales. Miles from the Royal Academy, he painted local dignitaries but did not create any ripples in the art world at large. These earnest and dignified works earned him membership in the Bristol Academy of Fine Arts, where he also taught. All in all, he was a well-respected man by both his pupils and peers and regarded as kindhearted, congenial, and an encouraging teacher. His marriage in the 1850s and the four children who arrived in quick succession in the 1860s seem to have coincided with his change from portraits to fairies, a reckless and inspired move that brought him fame, if only for a while.

His training as a miniaturist was surely a gift for a man entering the delicate world of the fae. Each of his visions was executed with clarity, detail, and a smooth finish as if it’d been brushed onto glass. His dreams of fairyland were both innocent yet alluring, free of any mischief and malice that crept into some fae imagery of the time. Instead, Simmons found his ideal of womanhood in the peerless Titania, statuesque and naked. In this he drew an interesting parallel to Vestris’s performances. Sharing the high art is all very well, but everyone would want to sneak a look at a beautiful naked lady. Take, for example, The Honey Bee Steals From the Bumble Bees (opposite), where we see a woman with pale moth wings regarding an errant bee caught taking pollen from a drowsy bumble bee. As the title references a line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we know it is the figure of Titania who is shining a light on this theft, the pinprick of bright burning from the tip of her hair-thin wand as she looks on admonishingly. Pale,with a cascade of platinum blonde hair, our Fairy Queen is naked but for the thinnest veil of gauze that seems to swoop from her waist to cover her modesty but very little else. It is debatable whether we are meant to feel titillated by this ivory queen or to await her judgement of our own misdeeds.

The same figure with powder-soft wings appears in one of Simmons’s best-known paintings, Titania (1866) (not shown here). On the frame is inscribed the repeated motto: “The honey bags steal from the humblebees.” The fairy queen once more glows in her spiderweb-thin gown, a spectral orb among the flowers and foliage. Echoing her pallor are the convolvulus or small field bindweed blooms, their meaning possibly hinting at the humility she’ll feel as she succumbs to the play’s spell and falls in love with Bottom. Her absorption with the natural world around her also speaks of her fascination with transience and mortality, which she, as an immortal being, can never possess.

Often in Victorian art of this genre, the fairy world seems within reach of our own, if we could only be aware of it. In Simmons’s 1870 Hermia and Lysander (opposite page), the mortal protagonists of A Midsummer Night’s Dream appear lost in a wood, unaware of the fae folk who surround them. In contrast to the flimsily clad fairies, Hermia’s robes are modest and her hair neatly bound. The couple is so absorbed with each other that Lysander doesn’t notice the fairy riding a mouse-powered chariot by his hand, nor the naked beauty atop the white hare with glowing eyes. Just beyond them, another stunning nude dances in the pollen of the honeysuckle while being fanned with a peacock feather. Any one of those extraordinary vignettes should be enough to catch even the most ardent of lovers’ eye, so either our couple is devoted beyond measure or extremely shortsighted.

Another explanation for our ignorance of the magical world just beyond our fingertips is that we are quite literally unconscious of it. In his 1873 A Scene From ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (see pages 30-31), Simmons shows the sleeping figures of Hermia and Titania, watched by the fairies. Around them climb the bindweed flowers, but if the blooms are read as woodbines, they have a narcotic inference. Couple that with the foxgloves present in his other works, and there is a hint of drugging and dreams. As in John Austen Fitzgerald’s The Dream After the Masked Ball, also known as The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of (1864), or his 1858 painting The Nightmare, the Victorians were aware of the presence, welcome or otherwise, of fae folk as they slept. The overt drugging of the figures in A Midsummer Night’s Dream may well have chimed with the use, and misuse, of opiates in the 19th century and the hallucinations that could arise. It is easy to believe in the magical world that surrounds you if you must be deeply slumbering for it to manifest. Also, the presence of such light and fleeting beauty when life becomes dark and difficult brings a comfort of its own.

Simmons’s art was embraced by critics and public alike. He was praised in the newspapers for his poetical treatment and cited as a talented and rising star, but his glory was too brief to be of great financial benefit. He died suddenly, at only 51. Such was the shock and sorrow felt in Bristol that a subscription was raised within the artistic world to save his widow and four young children who were left penniless. Despite his brief career and modest number of small canvases, the paintings Simmons left were to join the canon of the fairy genre that brought pinpricks of light to the modern certainties of the 19th century.

Sometimes life seems beyond our control and without hope, but take comfort in the fact that just beyond your peripheral vision, a fairy is racing by in a mouse chariot … and be glad.

Gazing at these photos, with the delicate, silken petals so slight they’re nearly translucent, one can almost smell the perfume of the fresh-picked blooms. Full blooms at the height of their glory, before their inevitable decay. We were careful to choose images that showcase Ukrainian artist Julia Oleynik at work, because the truth is so astonishing: These flowers will never decay, because they’re not real at all, but hand-fashioned, petal by petal, in Oleynik’s home in Latvia, where she creates these delicate beauties from clay and teaches others around the world how to do the same.

Below, she tells us more about this exquisite art form.

Enchanted Living: How did you begin working with clay in this way
Julia Oleynik: Flowers, painting, and sculpture have always inspired me—they’ve been an essential part of my artistic background. At some point, that inspiration came together in a modern form of art: ceramic floristry. It was there that realistic flowers began to emerge from simple pieces of white clay in my hands: flowers that never wilt. This idea became incredibly captivating. By using fine artist-grade oil paints, I’m able to achieve nuanced tones that bring the clay flower even closer to the look of a real one.

EL: What are you trying to achieve through your work?
JO: I’m happy to share my experience with women from many different countries. Through my work, I hope to introduce more people to this beautiful form of art—one that captivates you from the very first moment. And with time, who knows, it may become a beloved hobby for some.

I continue to explore the creative possibilities of this craft, making flowers not only for interior pieces, but also for fashion brands, where my blooms become part of a dress or serve as floral accessories.

EL: Can you tell us about your love for flowers and recreating them?
JO: I love studying each flower and its uniqueness—it’s like reading the thoughts of nature. I’m in awe of its imagination: every flower has its own color palette, shape, grace, and personality. These are unique forms that reflect the individuality of each bloom.

EL: What inspires you?
JO: Nature inspires me. So do talented florists, and my students, who share their beautiful results with me. And of course, I’m deeply inspired by the projects I work on, especially when I see them come to life as part of a wedding brand’s collection.

EL: How do you manage to preserve that sense of magic?
JO: I simply love the creative process with all my heart. I enjoy expressing myself through my work. What inspires me most is the act of shaping each flower—and the feeling of joy when I see a bloom that will never fade, crafted from a humble piece of clay in my own hands.

Follow Julia on Instagram @julia_ok8.

In the last days of his life, Ann Wood’s father was thinking about plants. “He was looking at a sumac tree,” she says, “and he started describing how beautiful

it was. I just thought, Wow, he’s talking about plants. We could be discussing all kinds of things, but he’s talking about plants.” It struck her as both interesting and heartbreaking at the same time—and “like maybe there is a key to the universal here.”

She’d been working as a mixed-media artist for decades by then, after growing up on her parents’ Iowa farm and later graduating from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. That was where she met her husband, and the two of them set up a fine craft business together while maintaining their own separate bodies of work. Suffering the loss of her father made her re-evaluate her direction. She wanted to make art that was personal to her—and through the personal, tap into the universal.

She’d also just joined Instagram, where she discovered artists working in paper to make botanical sculptures. They inspired her to go back to her roots, both literally and metaphorically. She wanted to make something primal, and she loved the idea of using paper, which can be manipulated to produce all sorts of amazing effects. She started by creating a simple feather, and ended up making a whole collection of feathers. And then came butterflies, and flowers, and paper food, and mushrooms, and birds.

There was an immediacy to this new medium that she liked. She was used to working on a piece for six months or longer; now she was creating quickly, putting her pieces on social media, and getting instant feedback. It was a new way of working in and within a community, reaching people anywhere in the world. It turned out to be just what she needed to progress as an artist and work through her grief.

When people look at her work, they’re astonished—first at the lush effect and minute details, then at what goes into it. People often marvel: “That’s paper? You can do that with paper?” That’s where she’s hoping to go, Wood says.

Her technique represents her subjects at the peak of their beauty. Flowers and mushrooms have their moment of voluptuousness and then decay, and for her, “it’s about capturing that moment … holding onto it and trying to understand it.”

Mushrooms are especially ephemeral, she says, because they appear so suddenly, then disappear just as fast. Within twenty- four hours they might reach their peak beauty and then melt away. To really capture a fungus, then, she has to study it in all its fleeting specificity. “I’ve made a lot of mushrooms that have gills on the underside,” she says. “That’s the part that most feels related to flowers in form, beauty, and delicacy.”

Each plant or fungus is shaped and marked by its own life story, an individuality she calls randomness. That’s one of the issues in making this art, she says: “That randomness is extremely hard to achieve. And most things are random. They’re not perfectly symmetrical. A young mushroom can be pristine white, or at a different stage, it might have some stain on it, or maybe something’s taken a bite out of it. To me, nature’s beauty is about that randomness.” The imperfections create personalities, and we get the sense that Wood knows each one of her subjects intimately: “Every single thing that grows in nature is unique. Every flower shape is unique. I would have never known that if I hadn’t studied plants and fungi so closely.”

Wood’s process is complex and painstaking. “The really fun part for me,” she says, “is coming up with the ways to create texture and color.” She estimates that she uses twenty to thirty different types of paper regularly—“some of it’s thick, some of it’s cardboard, some of it’s super-thin and transparent.” The paper itself might be ripped, cut, sliced, diced, or rolled up into a little ball; she could sand, press, or hammer it to get just the effect she needs.

Color and luminosity are key concerns. White paper can look either heavy and solid or light and thin. For example, applying a coat of white glue makes her mushrooms translucent. She paints the paper to match the colors that the mushroom (or flower or any other subject) would be in real life. Thick paint and different finishes give more texture, making a piece glossy or shiny. She also uses colored pencils, gouache, and acrylic. One mushroom, for example, might require twenty different colors, twenty different tones, with maybe five variations of red in it.

While paper might be the beginning medium, Wood stays true to her roots as a mixed-media artist, which means she might (for example) throw dust on wet paint to create an effect. “My whole thing really is about exploring different techniques that I invent along the way to have paper translate into the real thing,” she says. She’ll incorporate whatever it takes to create the right texture—even some rather bizarre materials. “I was pulling lint out of the dryer one day,” she says, “and I realized that it looked like the top of one of the mushrooms I was working on. I thought, What if it was rolled into little balls? I’ve used spices for the pollen on flowers, like paprika—it works for pollen on a lily. The whole world becomes a source of materials.”

Wood now has a steady stream of inspiration—and challenges.

She follows several mushroom foragers’ accounts, has a library of field guides and art books, and is always astonished at discovering new varieties she’s never seen before. Right now, she says, she’s working on some tiny mushrooms with caps the sizes of stud nails, which will cover a three-inch piece of bark covered in moss. She’s figuring out how to get up inside to make the gills.

That kind of challenge keeps her work constantly expanding. How will she make the moss? How will she get it to look just the right amount of random? How can she convey a mushroom’s personality, so that when someone looks at a piece, they stop and say, “Wow, that’s really cool”?

She might not have all the answers right away, but we can give her one right now: She will do it all with the ingenuity, grace, and sheer amazing creativity that keep us marveling at both the natural world and the power of art.

See more of Ann Wood’s work at woodlucker.com and follow her on Instagram at @woodlucker.

A fox curls up in the bowl of a spoon; a human face smiles mischievously from the handle. A ghost peers coyly around the stem of a martini glass. Or—our favorite—a long-stemmed amanita bends to form the handle of the happiest mug of soup you’ve ever held. Welcome to the ultra-whimsical, ultra-colorful, functionally creative world of ceramics artist Victoria Baba.

Born in Belarus and now living in Muğla, Turkey, she hand-builds and -glazes all manner of must-haves—mugs, spoons, wall hooks, earrings, cocktail glasses, and other forms of needful home décor the rest of us haven’t dreamed of yet.

She isn’t interested in standardized, completely utilitarian things, she says. She wants to create a whimsical, cozy world in which ordinary utensils bring joy—a world where “coffee is not just coffee; where a teaspoon is not only a spoon but also something from a fairy tale; where classic hooks become bunnies, birds, or mushrooms growing from the wall; and where classic mug handles become mushrooms, cows, or rabbits.”

She first fell in love with ceramics at Brest State Technical University, when, as an engineering student, she attended a workshop and was dazzled by the possibilities of clay, especially with colorful glazes. “I call myself a glaze maniac,” she says. “I want to buy and use all the glazes in world! I also like to concoct my own colors from powdered pigments and basic glazes.” Later, as a working engineer, she began a parallel life, taking private lessons from professional artists and learning everything she could about handling clay, making plaster molds, and firing in kilns. Eventually she started her own one-woman business, Murava Ceramics, which became so popular it now supports her full-time.

Her roots in Belarus are a clear source of inspiration. “It’s a country of forests and lakes,” she says. “And its aesthetic comes from the forest: animals, birds, mushrooms, berries.” She spent every childhood summer in her grandmother’s village house. They

harvested blueberries, wild strawberries, and, of course, mushrooms. “I remember going deep into a wild forest, searching for berries and mushrooms. Grandma and I would call back and forth so as not to get lost. I’ll never forget those times.”

For her, the mushroom is a symbol of deep, wild forest, not to mention her most popular creation. “The forest will show you its deepest treasures,” she says, referring to those hidden clusters, “but only if it wants you to see them.”

Find Murava Ceramics at muravaceramics.etsy.com and on Instagram @murava_ceramics.