The Serious Whimsy Of Beatrice Billard

 

Many of these works are a few years old now but the beautiful layering of the mysterious and the slight edge to these whimsical fairy tale paintings by Beatrice Billard never gets old.

Her portfolio included title and description so I thought those the best images to include. Her portfolio and blog have many many more beautiful and fantastic pieces so be sure to go check her out.

Endicott Studio did a short post on her in 2007 which gives us a little more information than is on her website. Check it out to see her artistic influences - you'll find yourself recognizing their influences but also marvel at how she's still made the art very much her own.

Many of these would be lovely as prints for a stairway or perhaps as a frieze for a little girl's room. Either way I'd love to find a set of cards with these tales so I could own a quality set of prints.

Although she has some work for sale in various places I haven't found any recent online activity by her for a couple of years. Hopefully that just means she's hard at work producing more beautiful pieces.

Provensen's "Tales from the Ballet"

From their book "Tales from the Ballet" (Golden Press 1968) by Caldecott Medal winners illustrators Alice and Martin Provensen*. As the title suggests, many of these tales are fairy tales. Either ballets were created from old tales like Sleeping Beauty and Ivanand the Firebird or new fairy tales like Giselle were written, often based on a little piece of something else (Giselle was based on a poem). The Nutcracker, of course, is originally by E. T. A. Hoffman, truncated and adapted from his very long short story 'Nutcracker and the Mouse King' .

The Sleeping Princess Coppelia (2 images) The Golden Cockerel Giselle
The Nutcracker
The Firebird

You can find more on the Provensen husband-and-wife author and illustration team* HERE and see the lovely Alice Provensen gallery HERE.

NOTES:
*The Provensen's are not credited with writing 'Tales from the Ballet' as well as illustrating it. The writer is listed as Louis Untermeyer.
*The Provensen's didn't win the Caldecott for this book but for "A Glorious Flight", a biographical picture book about an aviator.
*Some of these images were found on Flickr. The others were found on various foreign rare book seller sites.