Pixie Wings: The Fairy Variations

[Jody Kruskal]

My latest video project on youtube is now up for viewing.

Pixie Wings: The Fairy Variations

80 vintage fairy paintings and illustrations by 27 artists, set to my solo concertina dance tune, "Pixie Wings" off the CD “Cool Tunes for Hot Dances” available everywhere.

The tune drones on, setting the mood, while I play my Dipper, and you get 10 minutes of British Victorian Romanticism. Fairies high and low. Great art ranging from cute and innocent babes to nude sprites, gods and goddesses, wings and all.

Enjoy! Watch, listen and do comment please.

Edited July 18, 2013 by Jody Kruskal

[Anglo-Irishman]

Delightful!

 

And you even found a few concertina-playing fairies as a bonus!

 

John

[Defra]

Nice art but wonderful music - thanks for posting.

 

Dean

[Dan Worrall]

Nice one Jody....wonderfully put together.

 

Now don't show those to Arthur Conan D; you'll set him off again!

 

Cheers,

Dan

[Guest mglamb]

.

Edited August 10, 2013 by mglamb

[Dan Worrall]

Nice work, Jody! Actually, the Doyle that this brings to mind is A.C.'s father, Charles Altamont:

 

Maybe for you...I can see what you mean. But the more famous is the Cottingley Fairies hoax, which is the Arthur Conan Doyle episode I refer to.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies

 

Strange that someone so schooled in the scientific pursuit of evidence could be so duped. What would Sherlock have said? Maybe he would have let it pass, being too absorbed in Jody's fine playing...

[Guest mglamb]

.

Edited August 10, 2013 by mglamb

[Jody Kruskal]

More famous, perhaps, but still just poorly-doctored photos in the end. His father's illustrations, especially those done while at the asylum are far more captivating to me.

Fairy art runs strong in the Doyle family. Seems that poor C.A. was very disturbed. Are the insane attracted to fairies, or is it that being obsessed by fairies makes them so? Long before Shakespeare and Queen Victoria drove the fairy fad onto the canvasses of the British Romantics, fairy folklore suggested that you should protect yourself from deadly magical mischief by carrying cold iron or a piece of stale bread in your pocket. Not a bad idea for me, eh? Now that I too have succumbed to the feared fairy obsession.

 

C.A. Doyle's brother Richard was a successful illustrator and several of his pictures are included in this Pixie Wings collection.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Doyle_(illustrator)

Edited July 18, 2013 by Jody Kruskal

[Dan Worrall]

 

 

C.A. Doyle's brother Richard was a successful illustrator and several of his pictures are included in this Pixie Wings collection.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Doyle_(illustrator)

 

Wow...what a pixie-fied family. I wonder if all this family history had anything to do with AC's blundering into a prankish hoax? He must have wanted to believe!

By the way, the 'poorly doctored' photographic images of alleged fairies probably looked a lot more believable at the time, early in amateur photography. Just like the witch in the Wizard of Oz, with all that fakey green face paint, scared the bejeez out of generations of kids but would be unlikely to do so today.

 

[Guest mglamb]

.

Edited August 10, 2013 by mglamb

[Jody Kruskal]

Hi C.Net,

Thanks for looking at my Pixie Wings - The Fairy Variations video up on youtube last week. I’ve taken it down now and replaced it with a new improved version with the same title. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMkIhDrb4-c

Gone are the Angels, a very nude Venus and a few others. Added, are over a dozen amazing new fairy pictures that I’m sure you will enjoy, bringing the total to 94 vintage fairy paintings and illustrations by 36 artists The basic idea is the same, to show at a 10 minute glance, the wide variety of fairy images that came out of the 19th century British Romanticism Fairy Fad... all arranged to my concertina tune Pixie Wings.

Because I am showing high (and low) art from 150 years ago, there is still lots of nudity and a few (perhaps) disturbing images. So, it’s not recommended for very young children, despite being about fairies.

Disclaimer: aside from fairies, you may also see a few knights, nymphs, imps, goblins and muses, various Gods and Goddesses, strange characters from Shakespeare plays etc. Do not be alarmed. It is all part of the program.

I would love to hear your comments. Do you think this second version is an improvement? Miss the Angels? Did I try to squeeze in too many pictures?

My aim is to fill the entire 10 minutes + of this 32 measure AABB tune, eight times through (yes, it’s supposed to be repetitive dance music)... to fill that entire time with compelling pictures... so riveting... that you are entertained the whole time and don’t click out before the new surprise ending. 10 minutes is actually a long time for a video of this kind. My son (19) got to about three minutes and then he’d had enough. What about you? Did you stick with it or click out?

Personally, I’ve been looking at this fairy art for two weeks now, and loving every minute of it. What you are seeing here is way less than .1% of what can be found these days just a click away on the incredible www.

Edited July 24, 2013 by Jody Kruskal

[Anglo-Irishman]

Jody,

I liked this version too!

I didn't miss the angels - in fact, they were the only motifs that I found less fitting in the first version.

Esoterically and iconographically speaking, I suppose angels and fairies represent the same thing: a perfect human body, but with wings to enable them to reach "higher" spheres than we wingless humans can reach; a missing link with the Divine.

But the feathered wings of the Angels in religions that originated in the Near East do have close associations with their arid cultures, whereas the insect wings of English fairies have more in common with the "bee-loud glades" and summer-flowered meadows of our temperate Islands, and are more associated with Nature religion - but still a link between Humans and the Divine in Nature. A tiny fairy fluttering over a simple wildflower shows us what a complexly magnificent creation a blossom is, when you view it in a different dimension.

 

The choice of different styles of fairy illustration certainly held my attention, and I watched the whole clip, wondering what beautiful, grotesque or cute pictures would come next.

 

And that was a good thing, because the music wasn't all that repetitive. Just when I thought I had the execution of the tune in my head, you introduced some subtle variation, which again held my attention and made me wonder what you would do next.

 

Very well done! We can be thankful that we have YouTube and similar platforms to give us this and other powerful combinations of music and images.

 

Cheers,

John

[Jody Kruskal]

Jody,

I liked this version too!

I didn't miss the angels - in fact, they were the only motifs that I found less fitting in the first version.

Esoterically and iconographically speaking, I suppose angels and fairies represent the same thing: a perfect human body, but with wings to enable them to reach "higher" spheres than we wingless humans can reach; a missing link with the Divine.

But the feathered wings of the Angels in religions that originated in the Near East do have close associations with their arid cultures, whereas the insect wings of English fairies have more in common with the "bee-loud glades" and summer-flowered meadows of our temperate Islands, and are more associated with Nature religion - but still a link between Humans and the Divine in Nature. A tiny fairy fluttering over a simple wildflower shows us what a complexly magnificent creation a blossom is, when you view it in a different dimension.

 

The choice of different styles of fairy illustration certainly held my attention, and I watched the whole clip, wondering what beautiful, grotesque or cute pictures would come next.

 

And that was a good thing, because the music wasn't all that repetitive. Just when I thought I had the execution of the tune in my head, you introduced some subtle variation, which again held my attention and made me wonder what you would do next.

 

Very well done! We can be thankful that we have YouTube and similar platforms to give us this and other powerful combinations of music and images.

 

Cheers,

John

Thanks John,

 

I'm so pleased that you enjoyed my efforts.

 

I also shared the first version of my fairy video, including five or six images with angels and cherubs and putti and such with a news group I belong to. A few of those folks strongly objected to the Angels, on religious grounds I think. I took them out, not merely to avoid offense but because once they were brought to my attention, I also found them less fitting.

 

If you or any of us C.Net folks would be so kind as to post appreciation in the comments section of the youtube page, I would be thrilled.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMkIhDrb4-c

Edited July 24, 2013 by Jody Kruskal