North County Edition

You can see the love of her work in Linda’s eyes.
Photo by: Shannon Cimino Fitzpatrick

 

Look to the rainbow

Linda Biggs followed her heart to Fairieland

One never hears of fairies doing something for money. For mischeviousness? Yes. For love? Yes. To be helpful or to have fun? Absolutely.

Linda Biggs’ beautiful, big-eyed, busty fairy paintings appeal to men, women, little children and adults alike. They don’t discriminate, and neither does she. Their images, each of which has a story behind it, range from dainty and demure to outright seductive. Despite this, Linda’s fairies all share an air of absolute innocence that fills even the most risqué ones with sweetness and light.

Sometimes you have to ask the pink elephant question. Why the really big eyes and…um…bosoms? Linda laughs lightly and twinkles. “Well, I love big eyes. I always wanted them. And,” she twinkles, “well, I just draw the fairies as I’d like to be.”

So it’s as simple as that. With that out of the way, the next question is how one becomes an International Rainbow Fairy Artist, anyway?

“When I was a child, I always painted fairy type things. Despite that, I ended up in advertising for about twenty years. Nine to five quickly became seven a.m. to seven p.m. I had little children. I was never home. One day ten years ago, I just walked in and quit. It was annual report season, a huge time for the print industry…but I was done.”

Few could understand why Linda had left a successful job with lucrative clients. “But once I started, things just happened that felt over and over like ‘oh, my gosh, this is supposed to happen.’”

She applied to do the Sugarloaf Crafts Festival in Timonium and was immediately accepted. “I had never done a show before. I had NO idea what doing a show meant. I had six weeks to get ready, and worked like a maniac. I bought poles, drapes, lights, display units… I just put it all on a charge card. I had a total of six images on prints and cards.”

She sold everything. E-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. “In the empty booth, I thought, “This is what doing a show is all about! Look at all this cash!” She laughs. “How naïve I was!” With hard work, success started to build. “I developed a really solid group of customers who always wanted the next thing I painted.

Fairies have a reputation for helping people secretly, and so do some fairy aficionados. “A woman I’ve never met contacted me. She loved my work and wanted to be my ‘fairy godmother’. She started blasting information all over the internet about me.” The woman, who does parrot rescue, was like others Linda didn’t know, who simply started reaching out to help her.

“The biggest thing was a company called Monroe, in Ohio. They do statues of my girls,” she says, pulling a lovely figurine of a kneeling fairy from a cabinet. It is a delicate three-dimensional representation of the print on Linda’s table. “Monroe does really high-end work. They invited me to Denver to do signings. They gave my work exposure to hundreds of thousands of people.” The figurines are sold at stores such as Greetings and Readings, where Linda has done local signings.

She muses about how important those experiences have been. “People take time out of their day to see you. Every artist is so afraid that no one will ever come to a signing! But they do come. It is so moving to see little kids open up their wallets to buy something I’ve created. It says that your work matters.”

Fairies, appearing frivolous, can run deep.

Married and with two beloved teen daughters, Linda loves to talk at career days in schools. “I want kids to know you have choices in life besides business. Art’s a lot of work, but it’s a lot of freedom as well. It’s your work, and you can do whatever you want with it.”

Another question comes up. Why all the rainbow colors?

“I never really thought about it. When I was a kid, I had a teeny-tiny room, and when I was about ten, I decided I wanted to paint a rainbow in my room. I pestered my mother, could I? could I? and she bought a bunch of bright enamel hot colors and said go ahead.”

“I painted this rainbow literally all over the room, the walls, the ceiling. And it’s still there; my mother’s never painted over it. I would have worn black until there was no black left, but everywhere I looked, all this stuff was so bright. I always just loved it. I remember getting my first color wheel. I was entranced.”

In the beginning, Linda was very deliberate in putting a rainbow in everything, simply because it can be a challenge in watercolors to get a flowing transition from color to color. “I give huge kudos to James Drake Iams, my teacher at Towson High School.” Iams is a well-known Baltimore painter whose focus is nautical watercolors of Annapolis. “My teachers were so accommodating, always letting me be in the art room. Iams taught me so much. He had his 80th birthday not long ago, and he still paints. He often goes to Lynne Jones’s property in Monkton to sit and paint.” Lynne and Linda have a common connection besides friendship with Iams. Lynne also is a fairy artist, making shimmery, wearable wings that quickly sell out at festivals she attends.

Other than high-school art classes, Linda has had no other training, which perhaps is why her pieces have such a unique feeling. They are purely Linda—and their delicate nature belies the hard work of making them.

“I may get up two hundred times in a day from the painting and go right back to it. I sit in a strange little pose, working, sweating, trying to get it perfect. I don’t Photoshop anything in my prints, so it has to be right. Iams taught me to be patient. I could paint from morning to midnight. When my family is away, I paint for days straight. I don’t answer the telephone. I eat at odd hours.”

Linda’s painting started with rainbows, and evolved over time into fairies. She had always collected fairies, with Thumbelina being a favorite. One day she looked at her collection and thought there are other people out there making these and I’m buying them…there might be a market out there for me. “I didn’t know at the time that there’s a whole fairy underworld. When it actually started happening, I decided to do only what I like. It’s my art. I decided to do it to please myself. I don’t want to paint fruit on a table just to make money.”

For a while, many customers began buying artwork for emotional reasons. Some therapists would give them to patients. Another friend commissioned her to paint a piece for a wife who had committed suicide. The rainbow colors helped him get past the pain of her death. “It was incredibly difficult for me to do that piece,” she says. “But I have a passion about doing the right thing for people.”

Although healing for others, hearing challenging stories can actually make it difficult for Linda to work. “I am really painting as an outlet to express myself. Each piece tells a story about something that’s happened to me, someone I’ve met. There are hints in the piece and in my notes. Two hundred years from now, hopefully some art history class will find the breadcrumb trail and put it together.”

For example, “I had painted a fairy commemorating my Cherokee grandmother, but except for that, I’d stuck to what I know: my family has white skin and dark hair. I was at another Sugarloaf, and two little girls were flipping through the prints, saying no….no….no... I realized I didn’t have any fairies of a darker skin color. They’d looked all over the festival, wanting a fairy with skin like theirs. The littlest one asked me straight out: “can you paint something that looks like me?”

“I was petrified. I researched braided hair, and worried that the skin color wouldn’t come out right. I worked so hard on it, never knowing if I would ever see those little girls again. The next year at the craft festival, there they were! ‘Did you do it?’ they asked. I gave them the original as a gift. They named her Koko Komani Spirit from a song their mother used to sing to them. Those little girls taught me something. A mutual friend sent me an email after he heard them talking excitedly about it, telling me if only I knew what it had meant to them.” She pauses. “I hadn’t painted an Asian fairy either. Now I want to do one of every ethnic background.”

Despite the rainbow colors, not all of Linda’s subjects have a happy theme. “Fairies don’t always have a great day,” she says. Linda continues to find new ways to push the creative envelope and to reach out with her art. “I’m pushing in a few directions right now. There are misunderstood Goth and Emo kids I want to support. I’ve painted about abuse and self-destruction. I work a concern out on paper, and so many times, it touches what someone else is feeling.”

Linda keeps that as her focus for her business, rather than the simple pursuit of money.

The love of good has done well for her. Be it Melissa Etheridge’s guitarist, who has commissioned a piece for his album cover, or two unknown little girls at a craft festival, a pierced and beleaguered teen or fans in Canada and France, Linda pursues her art by doing what feels right, believing that one good thing leads to the next. “Encourage your children if they are creative,” she urges. “It’s not just about sports. Help them follow their little dreams.”

In delicate colors, with gossamer wings, those dreams may just take flight.

Katie Aiken Ritter