Some special thoughts and memories we had while writing Fairy House......

In writing Fairy House, we were able to revisit and relive the experiences we had while living on a small farm in the Northwest.....where our artists's journey began. As husband and wife artists, we were not only the collaborators of this unique art work but we were writing this book together, as well. This offered a unique perspective in itself. In this and many of our following posts, we will share anecdotes and stories from our lives as working artists and as husband and wife. Nature has been an inspiring third part of our creative lives, like an artist's muse, sharing all it's beautiful and glorious forms with us and giving us a unique view into the real "art" in nature. It felt wonderful to reminisce, during the writing of this book, about all of the art that we had created in the past 25 years, which placed an added value on the many fond memories we had shared and had in common. We also felt gratified that we had been given this opportunity to finally share all of our knowledge and talent with others through this wonderful book.

One of the most important motivations for writing this book was to help people to find the inner child within them. Our inspiration to create art from nature when we first began years ago, came not only from nature, but also from our two small children, our sons Michael and Matthew. Now that we are grandparents, we are still inspired by children and want to help them see the wonderful talents and gifts they have. We hope to touch the hearts of people young and old to find happiness through using creativity in their lives. We cannot emphasise enough the happiness we have experienced through working with nature and creating art from it. As our lives intertwined with nature for over twenty five years, we were made the beneficiaries of many awakenings about life, beauty and the humble spirit of the earth. We still look forward with excitement to what new dreams and visions we will have to create an even more beautiful and childlike world through our art and our story. It is our sincerest hope and our fondest dream that others will feel and experience these same joys of creating with nature.

We are largely self-taught artists but we both grew up in very creative and fascinating families; an environment that truly inspired our imagination and artistic vision. Mike's father was an aeronautical engineer and a singer; his mother was an artist. My parents were musicians, composers and music teachers. There were other artists in our families, as well as writers and actors. Our collaborative work began within the first few months of our marriage, when we gathered natural materials from our yard and our garden and brought them into our home, transforming them into small, curious habitats. It seemed like an unusual activity for us, as two newlyweds, but events in the future would explain why we were driven to create in this way. Our artistic abilities emerged again later, while raising our two sons. Seven years after our collaborative art began, a creative burst came upon us both, only this time it was not to be denied. We were uniquely suited for the art we would create with nature and to collaborating with each other. The ever growing cycles of the green and beautiful Northwest gave us opportunities to glean from nature and to create an art form that was a wonder and astonishment to our family, friends and neighbors, as well as to ourselves. Nature seemed to be teaching us how to see it in an entirely new way.

After we had been making our little fairy furniture for several months, we were encouraged to display our beautiful nature art at a local library. As a result, we received many requests to sell and exhibit our pieces in galleries and shops. We were well received in the Northwest but then, far beyond as well, when the international magazine Victoria ran a feature article about our work. We received over 800 letters and hundreds of phone calls in response to the Victoria article with people wanting to purchase our art. We realized we would need to produce a catalog for our growing number of followers. Then, an admiring fellow artist offered to introduce us to a sales rep who later took our work to major gift shows in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and New York. From there, shops, galleries and art collectors began placing orders and calling upon us to make one of a kind pieces. Thus our company Whimsical Twigs was born.

We continued to fill orders from shops and galleries from all over the country for our little nature furniture for eight years until, in 1995, Rebecca Hoffberger, the founding Director of the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, now one of the top ten museums in the U.S., invited us to have our Fairy Treehouse in the museum’s inaugural exhibit “The Tree of Life”. Standing nearly five feet tall, the Fairy Treehouse was our signature masterpiece, created in 1994, when the director of the Seattle Folk Life Festival asked us to build something extraordinary for a special miniature exhibit they were planning for the festival. Then, we were invited again in 2012 to show our fairy furniture and fairy houses in the American Visionary Art Museum’s 18^th one year exhibit. 125,000 art enthusiasts viewed our nature art along with many other artist’s pieces; ours was among the favorites of the exhibit, as it was in 1995 when our Fairy Treehouse was chosen as the 4^th favorite work of art from among the 400 works in the museum’s first show. 

Our nature art has been featured in many books including Chairmania by George Beylerian, art consultant, art collector and author; Morning Glories, a Victoria magazine publication; and Forget Me Not by Ho Phe Li, photographer and author, to mention just a few. Our work has also been in Travel and Leisure, Country Folk Art and Faerie magazines and the Seattle Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Baltimore Sun newspapers, among many others.

Our nature art has also been exhibited at the Seattle Art Museum store and the Rosalie Whyel Museum of Doll Art has many of our intricate fairy pieces in their permanent collection. Our art has been collected and purchased by many well-known people including, just to name a few, Producer Gil Netter (Life of Pi, The Blind Side, who purchasedone of Mike's original paintings), actor Aidan Quinn, Jennifer Nicholson, Jack Nicholson’s daughter, Mimi Danly, artist for Jim Henson, authors Mary Emmerling, Tricia Foley and Bob Timberlake, who is also an artist and designer.

Just a few of the hundreds of shops that have carried our nature art includes Fillamento and Felissimo in San Francisco and New York and the Ferrin Gallery, the Utica, Phoenix, Panaca and the Takashimaya, Japan, galleries. Our art pieces have been in New York department stores as well as in show rooms, art auctions and major art and miniature shows in various parts of the country as well. Commissioned pieces were accepted in the catalogue Finishing Touches for several years and for the New York Toy Fair by artist and author Lauren Mills.

We later turned to teaching workshops and classes in creating our art from nature at children's museums, public and private schools and in our own art studio/gallery, which we called "Marcel and Florette's Curious Menagerie", a name partly derived from the roles we played in our children's film "The Enchanted Treehouse". Our love of children inspired us to share our talents; we feel that children are the true artists in the world; their imaginations are pure and joyful. We have enjoyed working with and teaching all age groups of children and adults. As artists, we now work in many other mediums; having been so moved by the beauty of nature, we have been moved to incorporate painting, drawing, sculpture, collage, mixed media, film and writing into our careers. Our wonderful children’s film “The Enchanted Treehouse” was a collaborative project with our two sons, Michael, a composer and Matthew, a filmmaker. It was one of the most treasured experiences we've ever had as artists and as parents, to work with our sons in creating a film that represented beauty, gentleness and the wonder of learning.

We currently live in Sandy, Utah, just outside of Salt Lake City, where we work on our art, collect and sell antiques and maintain our art and antique websites. We also love gardening, especially growing flowers and also spend time going for walks and gathering little treasures from nature. We continue to marvel at the beauty and peacefulness of this lovely world. We are always creating new works of art, experimenting with different mediums and materials; however, our first inspiration will always be the beauty of nature. We truly have had an amazing array of experiences in our art career; we feel this has given us a unique ability and sensitivity to teach and share our knowledge and love of art with others.