Since I was lucky enough to take in the Mermaid Lagoon show this past week at the Neverland Aquarium, I thought I’d devote my editorial this week to great Neverland artists, past and present!
No discussion of Neverland’s storied artistic history could be complete without a mention of Bizzly, the world renowed fairy painter who famously mixed fairy dust in with his paints, which were all homemade from plants found in the Forever Gardens. This dash of magic produced colors so vivid and vibrant that no other artist to this day has ever been able to recreate them. Bizzly’s paintings primarily depicted human and fairy interactions, and they remain some of our most authoritative depictions of the relationship between the local fairy population and the Neverland colonists. Bizzly was, in fact, one of the first generation of fairies to cohabitate with humans. Perhaps his most famous painting is “Never Alone,” a portrait of a fairy consoling a little girl at her parents’ grave. “Never Alone” is supposedly an ode to Bizzly’s adopted human mother Margaret Oglivy, whose parents did die when she was young. Bizzly lived with Margaret from his childhood until she died of scarlet fever.
Cora Barrie, a descendant of J.M. Barrie, was an early 1920s novelist who reached international fame for her sci-fi novel “They Are Us.” The seminal novel posits that fairies are the souls of humans after death, and follows a desperate woman trying to find the fairy, and thus the soul, of her dead husband. A big screen adaptation of “They Are Us” is slated for release in 2017.
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