As an artist, he was a brilliant, painstaking technician whose strange fairy-talelike images, held together by a clever geometry, were bathed in a peculiar granular light.
His medium-large pictures are strange, fairy-tale-like scenes, involving dogs, birds and a dead deer in a shifty, primordial world.
(The detail that tends to surface is the strange fairy-tale fact that his parents bricked up the windows of his bedroom, leaving only a small chink of light for him to see out of, and leading him to identify with those Edgar Allan Poe heroes who were buried alive).
"I remember Comrade Gulliver, a Russian finding America a very strange place, and fairy tales about workers' children.
Of all the Strauss operas, this fantastical, strange and humane fairy tale, first presented in Vienna in 1919, is the longest, the most musically elaborate, the most philosophically resonant and the most daunting to stage.
But his collaboration on "The Strange Library" — a fairy tale that reads at times like a grim blend of Kafka and Lewis Carroll, with a touch of whimsical erudition in the vein of "The Phantom Tollbooth" (the subtitle of the illustrated Japanese edition, published in 2005, is "a fantasy for adults") — marks the first time he's illustrated an entire book front-to-back.
Hardwicke brought a similar resoluteness to the role of Conan Doyle himself when he played him in Nick Willing's strange movie Photographing Fairies (1997), telling Toby Stephens's professional debunker of photographic forgeries about his own supernatural experiences.
Atheists need ghosts and kings and magical uncles and strange coincidences, living fairies and thriving Lilliputians, just as much as the believers do, to register their understanding that a narrow material world, unlit by imagination, is inadequate to our experience, much less to our hopes.
The photographs have the strange, artificial quality of fairy pictures from the turn of the last century: false documents of fantasy scenes.
The strange saga of the fairy circles got even stranger last year.
