The creators who make me happy

Introducing two very good eggs: the Princess and the Peasant

This week I’m kicking off an occasional series of herograms to artists - the Artnest’s Good Eggs - who improve the quality of my life by marching to their own beats and making work about it. I’m not setting a strict criteria on who qualifies, instead I just want to share the love I feel for these folk in the hope that you might like them, too.

Meg Fatharly AKA Printcess Meg

I’ve followed Meg on Instagram for the past three or four years. She is a multidisciplinary printmaker and artist, or, as she sometimes describes herself, a Professional Art Person, who is based in the South-west of England. Above the door in my kitchen/living room there’s a Risograph print that she made of a bag of oranges in a net bag. I didn’t hang it there as a special citrus lintel guardian, although it does that job too. Instead it’s because there was already a nail there and given the damp crumbliness of my walls (think Caerphilly), I try not to interfere with them too much. Every time I sit on the sofa I spot it and am glad it’s there.

Oranges In Net Bag Risograph by Meg Fatharly. My crumbly wall not pictured (Photo from meganfatharly.com)

I bought the oranges from Meg when she had a pop-up show at Pentreath & Hall, a tiny shop in London that feels like it’s been made up by an Edwardian children’s author. I’d seen her videos online of printing with found objects and was thrilled to go home with one. It’s such a strange thing, social media (understatement klaxon). Twenty years ago, if you spoke about following someone, it sounded odd and creepy, or, at best, like you were an amateur sleuth - dogging someone’s steps and ducking behind parked cars if they turned round. 

What’s odd today is that I know, through a shiny rectangle that goes everywhere with me, that Meg has been doing some coloured embossing projects on dyed paper. I know from past posts that she struggles with anxiety and agoraphobia. Her studio flooded earlier this year and she translated the soggy experiences into some interesting AI experiments. She had a late diagnosis of ADHD. Her work is varied and beautiful. She runs creative workshops and supplies card and embossed tin drawings to incredibly impressive places including The Victoria and Albert Museum. She sometimes struggles with creative confidence and she helps other people boost theirs by running an accountability club, so that makers feel part of a community. She’s shared some of her art A-level sketchbooks - her sixth-form painting of lemons comes into my mind whenever I see a lemon - and I know she studied at Falmouth. I’ve met Meg once, and she was really encouraging about my plan to go to art school, but I don’t know her, I just feel like I do.

Look at this duck! (Photo from megfatharly.com)

Meg’s collages make me happy. So do her prints, and her drawings. So does the way she shares how she’s navigating life as a Professional Art Person. I cheer her successes and I hope she’s having more good days than bad. I hope that I’d still love her work even if I didn’t know the human story behind it, but I also know that I’m a sucker for narrative. I often worry that there’s not enough room in the world for more artists, and certainly not me. But then I see Meg’s beautiful work, and remember that she is just so brilliant at being HER. I wouldn’t dream of thinking that there’s not enough room for her and her work, which brings me such joy, so maybe I can believe there’s space for me too.

Oh, and it took me a seriously embarrassing amount of time to realise that her instagram handle isn’t Princess Meg but Printcess Meg. Just so no-one else has to feel as dim as I did when I finally spotted it.

(Photo from meganfatharly.com)

Meg is also on Threads, has an online shop, where you can sign up for her newsletter and is on Substack

In Progress from Meg Fatharly

, although she hasn’t posted in a little while).

The Greedy Peasant

During the great Plague of 2020, when I spent more time at home than I had for the previous five years put together, a video of a man in a really bad wig caught my scattered attention. This was, I learnt, a chap who called himself the Greedy Peasant whose Instagram posts chronicled his obsession with sleeves (the more ostentatious the better), his hat collection (prodigious, increasing in number) and holy relics as though he was living in the fifteenth century. He was the illuminated influencer I didn’t know I needed, and the world that he’s created - what he describes as a “queer mediaeval fever dream” - has become one of my happy places.

The Greedy Peasant

There’s a fair bit to unpack here. The Greedy Peasant is the alter-ego of American costume designer/illustrator/puppet maker Tyler Gunther who grew up in Arkansas and is now based in Brooklyn. “Created during a plague quarantine, Greedy Peasant seeks to broaden our understanding of the queer imagination during the middle ages,” he explains on his website. “Pageant design, reliquaries and tassels are all utilized to build this mythical congregation of Our Lady of the Sacred Blood of the Most Holy Martyr (OLOTSBOTMHM).” 

He’s created a cast of characters, played by himself, with appearances from Sister Cecilia (the most excellent artist @yuliya who also constructs lots of the props) helping him with pageantry, various. As well as the costumes that he makes for himself (the mediaeval-beekeeper outfit is a personal favourite) he also draws “biblically accurate” zodiac-inspired, pageant-costume paper-doll designs each month. On Patreon he also runs a Greedy Peasant Movie Club, which is very big on elaborately costumed and eccentrically plotted Hollywood epics from the 1950s.

The more I write the madder this seems, and I already thought it was very mad. And I’m not even encapsulating the half of it. His creative questing is totally joyful, as is his bemused delight that his audience is on this pageant-wagon with him. The Greedy Peasant’s also taught me so much about religious relics, mediaeval art history, church and cemetery architecture, pageants, Catholicism, costume construction and events planning. Watching someone’s creative universe expand in real time (even if that time is the Year of Our Lord 1424) is utterly captivating. I won’t try to tell you more, but I hope you get a sense of my why I’m obsessed.

A very modern, multi-platform peasant (Image from Instagram @GreedyPeasant)

If any of the above appeals, please check out his work. While I’m not saying that I can’t be friends with anyone who doesn’t like GP, I am saying that if you are a Greedy Peasant fan, let’s hang out. I follow him on Instagram and Patreon, and he’s also on YouTube and TikTok, but I can’t tell you anything about the latter because I have banned myself from TikTok because if I start on that, I won’t ever leave the house again. It would have a hold on me like a death-rolling alligator with an unlucky golfer in its jaws. 

Thanks for reading, and huge thanks to the Printcess and the Peasant for their services to making stuff that makes me happy. Good eggs the pair of them.