We think of fairy tales as bedtime stories now — soft, safe, resolved with a wedding and a fade to black. But that’s a fairly recent invention. For much of their history, these stories weren’t really for children at all. They were told and retold to make sense of the parts of life that were difficult to explain: loss, hunger, desire, the danger of trusting the wrong person, the cost of vanity, what happens to a girl who wanders off the path.
Cinderella was never really about a ballgown. The older versions are about grief, cruelty and surviving within your own family — the ballgown is almost incidental. The Little Mermaid didn’t get her legs, the prince and a happy ending. She got pain with every step and a choice between killing the man she loved or disappearing into sea foam. These darker endings weren’t simply accidents of an earlier, harsher time. They were part of what the stories were for. Things had consequences. Sometimes they were unfair. Sometimes the heroine paid a price.
"Den Lille Harfrue" — the title piece from my exhibition on the Little Mermaid. View the original or shop prints.
Greek mythology does much the same thing. Persephone is pulled into the underworld and spends part of every year there because of a handful of pomegranate seeds. Icarus doesn’t get a redemption arc. These are stories about consequence rather than comfort. Fairy tales, before so many of their edges were softened, worked in much the same way: less “happily ever after” and more “this is what might happen if you’re not careful — and sometimes, this is what happens even if you are.”
Somewhere along the way, a lot of that darkness was softened. Endings became happier, deaths disappeared, and danger became something to overcome before everything could be put right again. I understand why that happened, but I think something important was lost too.
These stories were never just entertainment. They gave people a way to make sense of fear, grief, loss and change — all the difficult, complicated things that are part of being human. They let us encounter darkness at a distance, through someone else’s journey into the woods, the underworld, the sea.
"Persephone" — view the piece.
It’s those older, stranger versions of fairy tales, folklore and mythology that I find myself returning to in my own work. The Little Mermaid who pays a real price. Persephone moving between two worlds. Women who aren’t simply good or bad, innocent or wicked, but complicated — caught between what they want, what is expected of them, and things much bigger than themselves.
I don’t paint these stories because I’m nostalgic for them. I’m interested in what sits underneath them, and in the way they still give us a language for things that can otherwise be difficult to hold onto or explain.
"Psyche" — the myth of Eros and Psyche. View the piece.
For me, that connects deeply with womanhood and motherhood, with memory, ritual and transience, and with the strange mixture of beauty and loss that runs through ordinary life. Stories change as they are passed from one person to another, just as memories do. Things disappear, reappear, become altered in the telling. I think painting can work in much the same way.
And perhaps that’s why I keep coming back to these stories. Not because I want to illustrate them, or retell them faithfully, but because they give me somewhere to begin. A way into something much more personal.
Into the things we lose and the things we carry with us. The stories we inherit. The rituals we repeat without always knowing why.
And those small, fleeting moments of beauty that appear anyway — the glimmers in the middle of everything else.
Browse more mythology and folklore-inspired work in the Prints collection, or explore the full shop.