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.

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.

It is in the thinnest layers that precious things are hidden,” Italian artist Laura Winter says. “The casing of a flower that lets its interior shine through, the filigree of a dry leaf, the wings of a moth.” We’ve long admired her delicate watercolors, oil paintings, and painted porcelain, with their scenes of blooming flowers and cascading leaves, of sweet birds and bats and cats and foxes, of gleaming, dropping fruit. It’s all so lovely. Winter likes to combine botanical and animal elements in harmonious compositions, she says: “A sinuous curve, a light shade of color that turns into its complementary color, the two blending together to form unique nuances in a tonal balance. This balance cheers the soul, rests and delights the eyes.” That’s what her art is—restful. As restful and soothing as it is beautiful.

Winter has a weakness for detail and intricate things. She uses different techniques that she believes shines through in each one of them. In ink illustration, she likes to create subtle textures through “hatching”: The lines blend like spiderwebs until they form a certain shape, she explains. “Through them you can discover different shapes. It’s like a microworld that creates itself, helped by the touch of the pen.” In oil painting, she’s most fascinated by color and the layering of colors—the magical “glazes” from Flemish painting that form unique atmospheres and from whose overlapping you can achieve unique shades sometimes impossible to create otherwise. For her, painting on porcelain is a mix of all this: “You can decide to have sharper lines, but you can also use colors with a more liquid consistency, creating veils of color that make the shapes as a whole more delicate and ethereal.”

She’s constantly inspired by a search for beauty, and “every object or natural element represents a world to discover and from which to draw a lot of inspiration.” You just have to know how to look, she says, and how to “observe deeply through and in things.”

See more of Laura Winter’s work on Instagram @laurawinterart.

Author and fairy expert Karen Kay has been hearing fairy whispers since she was a young girl—and it started in her grandmother’s wild, rose-filled garden. Kay would gather up the fallen rose petals, place them in a bowl with water, and crush them to make perfume for the flower fairies she knew inhabited that enchanted space. She’d leave the perfume out overnight, and it would always (of course) be gone in the morning. She saw the fairies, she writes, as tiny points of vibrant light, out of the corner of her eye, piercing through from the fairy realm into this one—and she does to this day.

And now she’s written a book about them. Fairy Whispering, which was published by Hay House last November, contains 111 ways to connect with the fairies through magical practices, including gorgeous rituals, spells, meditations, incantations, and visualizations. One of these spells, based on that most alluring and gossamer of fairy plays, is below.

Midsummer Night’s Dream Spell

Many of us are familiar with William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream—a play telling the tale of fairies playing games with humans on this most enchanted of nights!

Midsummer’s Eve is certainly a potent and magical time, during which fairies pierce the veil into our realm. This makes it the perfect time to connect with fairies.

This spell can be done indoors or outdoors. I always say that doing it outside is best. However, I know that this is not always possible, and doing it inside works equally well.

You’ll need some fairy dust (biodegradable glitter), a white or light‐ colored candle (ideally unscented), a small jar or lantern if going outside, and some rose essential oil and rose petals to represent midsummer.

The spell is to be performed any time between dusk and midnight on Midsummer’s Eve.

Place a few drops of the rose essential oil in your palm and put a small dab onto your third eye area (between your eyebrows). Then pick up your candle and, using your index finger and thumb, rub the oil from the top to the bottom. As you do this, say: I call upon Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies, to help me to love all that I see, and to accept with good grace what life gives to me. I call also on Puck, to bring me good luck and good fortune forever more. I am knocking upon your fairy door.

Next, light your candle, and say: With this flame I ignite this spell, for the highest good of all, wishing everyone well.

Then sprinkle your fairy dust over the flame. Hear it crackle and pop as the energy rises. Take care when doing this and keep your face and eyes at a distance. Next, take your rose petals, hold them up high, and allow them to fall gently over your head, energizing you with their sweetly scented energy. While you are doing all of this, hold the intention of inviting the king and queen of the fairies to connect with you. Be mindful that Puck can and probably will play games, as he is prone to do!

Follow Karen Kay on Instagram @karenkayfairy and find Fairy Whispering wherever books are sold.

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.

Picture them under glass: four small pieces of bark vered from left to right with the delicate white fungi udoniella acicularis, which is found on rotting logs; the feather moss Eurhynchium straitum, common throughout the wood; the cup-shaped blue fungus Chlorospenium aeruginascens; and in clusters of orange discs, the Anthracobia macrocystis—all gorgeous scientific specimens, carefully collected as if straight from the forest floor. Except these are made from … silk and thread? Thousands of miles of thread to be exact, and no small amount of enchantment.

Fiber artist Amanda Cobbett had been working for more than a decade designing textiles when she found herself wanting to sculpt and make three-dimensional art—both of which she’d done in school—once more. She also wanted to find a way to preserve the objects she foraged during the long walks she’d take with her dogs and children through the forest near her home in Surrey, England. A family friend had given her an old Bernina sewing machine, and she started experimenting. When her children’s school needed cakes for a fundraiser, she thought maybe she’d embroider replicas of her forest finds instead, just to see. They sold out. When she made more for the Chelsea Flower Show, they sold out too.

As she continued to experiment, dissolvable fabric was a huge revelation. She put it into an embroiderer’s hoop and used her machine to build up layers of thread. She discovered that when she washed away the carrier fabric, the embroidered thread that remained created a new textile she could use in her sculptural pieces. Using other materials as well, she developed new techniques for replicating what she saw in nature: She made papier-mâché stems for the fungi and covered them with fine silk, then embellished them with sewing, markers, and burning techniques.

Currently, she’s exploring and then replicating in thread the fungi and lichens on the various estates belonging to a duke in Scotland. She has a long waiting list of future commissions. And she won’t be bored anytime soon. “Different threads behave differently when put together, so the possibilities are endless,” she says. There’s always a new discovery on the horizon—or underfoot: “We’re naturally inclined to look at the bigger picture, but then we risk missing the tiny details that can be found all around us.”

See more of Amanda Cobbett’s work at amandacobbett.com or on Instagram @amandacobbett.

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.