摘 要

对西西莉·玛丽·巴克来说，“花仙子”不是一个仅存在于传说中的抽象概念，而是实实在在存在于人类身边、有血有肉的生灵，她心目中的仙子世界既美丽又天真，有着人类世界无法比拟的纯净。为此，她用双眼去观察，用心灵去感受，用双手去创作。最终在她的笔下，诗画两种艺术形式得以完美融合，共同呈现出一个有声有色、至纯至美的仙子世界。本文旨在通过分析巴克的创作来源和诗画技巧的运用，揭示诗画结合下的精灵世界的纯洁和天真。本文分为五个部分，第一部分介绍作品的内容和创作背景；第二部分分析她创作的灵感，探究她发现花仙子世界的心路历程；第三部分从色彩、线条和构图分析巴克的插画，探索充满诗意的画中世界，又从用措辞、修辞和意象分析巴克的仙子诗歌，发掘诗歌中蕴藏着的画面美感；第四部分从仙子世界区别于世俗世界的特性着手，探索仙子世界的纯真境界；最后一部分是总结。诗画两种艺术形式的结合，带来更加直接的审美感受，也使虚幻的仙子世界更加生动、真实。

关键词：西西莉·玛丽·巴克；花仙子；诗画

Abstract

For Cicely Mary Barker, “fairy” is not an abstract and vague conception which only exists in tales, but a group of creatures who have human-like bodies and live around human beings. The fairyland in her mind is beautiful and innocent, with pure features that human world can never have. Thus, she observes things around with her eyes, feels them with her heart, and recreates with her hands. Finally with Barker’s proficient skills, two different art forms, painting and poetry, combine with each other perfectly, showing a picturesque fairyland with purest beauty. The paper aims to discover the purity and innocence of the fairyland by analyzing the inspiration of Barker’s creating and applications of painting and poetic techniques. It is divided into five parts. The first part is introduction to the background information of Barker’s works; the following part analyzes the sources of inspiration, investigating on the whole creating process. The third part analyzes fairy illustrations in terms of the use of colors, lines and composition of pictures, exploring the fairy world in paintings, which is full of poetic enchantment; it also analyzes fairy poetry in terms of diction, rhetoric and images, discovering the visual aesthetics underlying the poetry. The fourth part focuses on the different features of fairyland from human world, disclosing the realm of innocence in fairyland. The last part is the conclusion. The composite of painting and poetry brings about a kind of aesthetic feeling that is much more direct and intuitive, and at the same time makes the fanciful fairy world more vivid and authentic.

Key words: Cicely Mary Barker; flower fairies; painting and poetry

Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 World in a Grain of Sand 3

2.1 Extrasensory Perception 3

2.2 Observation and Imagination 4

3 Fairyland: Heaven in a Wild Flower 6

3.1 Word Painting 6

3.2 Visual Poetry 10

4 Infinity in the Palm, Eternity in an Hour 15

4.1 Finite Beings and Infinite Fantasy 15

4.2 Pure Land in Secular World 15

5 Conclusion 18

References 19

Acknowledgements 20

Poetic Microcosm of Flower Fairies

1 Introduction

As an illustrator bestowed with artistic talent and superior creativity, Cicely Mary Barker has long been famous for the fantastic fairyland she created with her painting brush. She was born in a moderately well-off family in West Croydon, Surrey in 1895. Due to physical frailty, she was well protected and lived a happy and secure life during her childhood, which contributes to the cultivation of her childlike characteristics. Those characteristics, including curiosity and imagination, had all become parts of the source of her inspiration. Also during her childhood, Barker spent much time reading painting books and she quite appreciated Kate Greenaway and Randolph Caldecott, whose works later had great influence on her painting style. Besides, she was greatly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, especially in choosing subjects for depicting and the creation concept of “truth to nature”.

Encouraged by her father, who was also an accomplished artist, Barker was sent to take correspondence courses in art when she was thirteen years old. When she was sixteen, she had her first work published as a set of postcards. The first book of Flower Fairies, Flower Fairies of the Spring, was published in 1923. Her delicate works featuring extraordinary fantasy and innocent beauty were well accepted and soon became popular among the war-weary public.

There are not only delicate illustrations in Barker’s Fairy world but also innocent poetry. In painting, she showed proficient applications of vivid hues and exquisite brushworks. While in the poetry, she was good at using simple words and innocent tones. The composite of paintings and poetry enables the fairyland to become no longer a mere fantasy but a visualized world, and also bestows the fairy folk with life, releasing them from the limitations of time and space and showing readers a fairy world with humanlike vitality and fairy-tale innocence.

In fact, the formation of combining painting with poetry is not rare in literary work, particularly in fairy-tale literature where the composite of painting and poetry instills more vitality into the original work.

The enchantment brought by combination of painting and poetry could date back to the days of Homer, whose Iliad (Book 18) describes the Shield of Achilles. The relationship between poetry and painting is one of the most controversial issues in the history of criticism. Critics have long been troubled by questions like how to make sure that a poem is inspired by a painting and whether a literary or an artistic approach should be used to analyze it (Trevisan, 2013). Since 1960s, critics endeavored to study on the relation between painting and poetry. In 1990s, they began to study on the internal relevance between word and image, trying to figure out whether and how visual and verbal art could mix in the same art form to get across the same idea(谭琼琳，2010). But they never achieved an agreement. For instance, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing stated that painting was art of space while poetry was art of time; so painting was only able to depict the “body” while poetry could only describe the “action” (Lessing, 1962). This opinion emphasizes the uniqueness of the two art forms. But Zhu Guangqian pointed out that Lessing irrationally considered both painting and poetry as arts of imitation and ignored the power of imagination, insisting that art could transcend the limitation of mediums (朱光潜，2005). This paper refers to Zhu Guangqian’s criticism of Lessing’s view on painting and poetry, trying to discover the possibilities for art to get rid of limitation of different art forms.

Existing studies on Barker’s fairy works mainly center on the illustrations. Studies that focus on the composite application of painting and poetry in Barker’s Flower Fairies are rare. Thus, this paper studies on the fairy world created by Barker, analyzes the source of her inspiration and creation as well as the application of painting skills and poetic techniques, aiming to explore the poetic enchantment in paintings and visual aesthetics in poetry as well as to disclose the purest realm of the fairyland, which is quite different from the human world. It also attempts to add more researches in this field, drawing more attention to the study of painting and poetry on Barker’s Flower Fairies.

2 World in a Grain of Sand

As one of the “common people”, how come Barker could have the accessibility to inspect the fairyland so closely and meticulously? The answer is that she has acute perception and observation. Thanks to extrasensory perception, she is convinced of the existence of flower fairies; while through careful observation and imagination, she is able to find the trail of those little folk and then depicts them. Therefore, in Barker’s eyes, the humblest things in daily life could be parts of a boundless and fantastic fairy world.

2.1 Extrasensory Perception

Except for the five senses that normal people all have, artists seem to have a sixth sense, which is the so-called extrasensory perception. The term refers to psychic abilities such as telepathy, clairaudience, and clairvoyance, and their trans-temporal operation as precognition or retro-cognition. In other words, people who have extrasensory perception are able to see or hear things that common people cannot see or hear.

Barker happens to be such an artist. She prefers quiet and peaceful environment and has a pair of eyes that can discover inconspicuous beauty. It is her extrasensory perception that enables her to encounter with fantastic phenomena that are hard for others to notice. For instance, she once “caught a glimpse of something on the path” when she was watering flowers (Barker, 2005, p.2). And if she was too lazy to do her chores, her toes would be stung as a little punishment, while little executors just hid behind the curtain and giggled.