How rude, sorry, didn't have the time to explain my last two posts over the weekend. 'East of the Sun west of the moon is a link to a fairytale I read last week on the Sur La Lune Website, (there is a constant link to the website in my 'links'.) I just fell in love with this story, it's a similar tale to that of 'Cupid and Psyche' and 'Beauty and the Beast'.
The two pictures are illustrations of the story by Kay Nielsen. I've been reading up on Kay Nielsen today and he was a Danish illustrator of many fairytales in the 'golden age' of gift book design in the first quarter of the twentieth century. He illustrated versions of 'Han Christian Anderson's fairytales' as well as the 'Hansel and Gretal' and 'Twelve dancing princesses'. He then went into stage production, staging productions of 'A midsummer nights dream' and 'The tempest'. Moving to California he went to work for Walt Disney productions, designing 'the night on bald mountain' sequences in 'Fantasia' and creating designs that would be used fifty years later in the 'Little mermaid.' He sadly died in poverty in 1957, his last years were provided for by some very loyal friends who understanding his work would experience a resurgence in popularity held onto his artwork until the time was right.
I think his work is just beautiful and captures the essence of the world of fairytales so well.
I had a lovely weekend, had an evening out with friends, danced to 'This is the dawning of the age of aquarius' in an extremely silly manner, watched 'The servant', went to a record fair, bought lots of great new music including a fab new folk band called 'The 18th day of May', got blisters on my hands from more toiling on the plot and kept waking myself up last night digging in my sleep!