About Lifetime Changes and Childhood Tales

Heida Rafnsdottir

Sep 30

3 min read

Hi and welcome!

I have been very quiet here the past year and just wanted to update you, my trusty subscribers, on the latest news from my studio!

News

The past six months have been quite unusual. I lost my job of 8 years in March, finished half of a masters/teaching degree in May and sadly, we lost our beloved cat and my studio companion, in August 💔

Having been occupied last year with a full time job as well as masters studies, left me very little time to do any artwork. However, the past three months have been all about establishing a new routine and making decisions 🤔

What’s next

Big decisions take a long time and it was only a few weeks ago that I decided to pause my masters studies. I plan to channel my time into my illustration, look for jobs in the industry and building a business.⌛

Summer artwork and fairytales

Now, for the main part, some talk about new artwork made during this summer.

I drew “Alone in the woods” and “Looking for the breadcrumbs” in December last year. They are well at home in my Skruffy series. However, it was only when I started painting them this summer that I realized the characters were inspired by my memories and feelings from listening to Grimm’s fairytales on a vinyl record as a child. I remember distinctly my frustration of having to ask someone older to flip the record for me, so I could listen to another tale on the other side. The frustration came from having to wait for that someone :)

I am grateful for having had access to the original versions, unabridged and including all the “horror”. Just imagine being in a story as a child and suffering such horrors! Imagine being a child, left alone in the woods, among wild beasts, unfamiliar flowers and menacing looking trees, because a hunter didn’t have the heart to kill you. Or having to push a child eating witch into a burning stove to save your brother's, and your own life. I don’t remember being afraid, even though I was no older than 5 or 6. I remember thinking a lot. Thinking about how cruel someone can be, about how it must feel to be all alone or unwanted and thinking about how a girl and her grandmother could actually manage to breath inside a wolf's stomach! I also happened to think a lot about trees and forests and now believe that these tales were the foundation for me, to becoming a true nemophilist (meaning: to be a lover of forests). That all being despite the fact that I grew up in a landscape totally devoid of trees, or maybe that was also a big reason!

I loved these fairytales, I still do, and enjoyed listening to them again with my own two children. I especially love the fact that countless children around the world have listened to the same tales for ages and ages, maybe even thought the same thoughts as me or my children and hopefully learned some useful lessons! Tales, fairytales and folktales unify us all in our humanity.

Art prints

I'm well into my goal of printing art from two years ago. I have prepared prints of these two already and they were very well received at the last art market.