A Return to Wonder: Why I Created the Academy of the Enchanted Arts
Georgie 
Letters from the Library, Vol. I: A Return to wonder: How The Academy of Enchanted Arts awakens your soul through art, music, and literature's magic.
Letters from the Library, Vol. I
“The sound of colours is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would express bright yellow with base notes or dark lake with treble….generally speaking, colour directly influences the soul. Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposely, to cause vibrations in the soul.”
- Wassily Kandinsky
Dear Enchanted One,
Welcome to the Academy Of The Enchanted Arts!
My name is Georgie (she/her) and I am the founder of the Academy of the Enchanted Art: an online sanctuary where art history, music history and literature are not merely studied, but felt and become a portal to awe.
And, I’m not alone in my fascination with the wonders and intermingling of the arts!
The above quotation from Kandinsky’s ‘Concerning The Spiritual in Art’ is particularly apposite to introduce you all to Academy Of The Enchanted Arts.
Like Kandinsky I have a longing for colour, for sound, for beauty, yes, but something more: for soul, for slowness, for wonder, for awe and otherworldly enchantment.
For a space where the arts could breathe and bloom together, and where painting and poetry and music could whisper to each other again, as I passionately believe they always have.
Once upon a time, whilst deeply unsatisfied with my rigid art and music history education, coupled with managing spiralling chronic health conditions and an unaligned University environment, I became deeply depressed and longed to open my own online school that focussed on the symbiotic relationship between the arts.
Fast forward to today, I'm now on a deeply personal mission to inspire creative, highly-sensitive and enchanted souls just like you to experience arts education steeped in enchantment so that you are able to enter into a world of deep reverence and awe.
When I hear a piece of music, or when I look at a great work of art, to me it's a portal to the divine through the door that the artists have left open.
These creatives truly are the mystics that continue to grace us with their gifts so that we can then walk through their door and experience the world around us with more awe and wonder than we could possibly imagine.
It's with this sense of rapture and awe in relation to the arts that I guide my students in the Academy so that you can marvel at the wonders of the history of art and music.
If you have even resonated with 5% of the above, I know we’ve not met by accident, and that we were destined to meet! Through this letter, I wish to gently unveil the story that shapes my spirit even more!
When Ribbons Were My Remedy: How Beauxoxo & Blogging Were Born
So, for those who love to read and understand the language of the stars, I carry the fiery questing heart of a Sagittarius sun, the soft, shimmering dreamscape of a Pisces moon, and the curious, poetic wings of a Gemini rising, fluttering with a thousand ideas (both a blessing and a course!). If you’re someone who knows astrology well, I think you can see the Academy deeply in all of my placements!!
If you’re curious about Human Design, I am a 6/2 Manifesting Generator and I’m presently embracing the stillness of my hermit phase; an invitation to rest and reflect (harder than it seems!). At my core, I also remain an INFP, forever wandering the landscapes of meaning and soul. With all this together, you can see why the arts have always called me so deeply!
I was first utterly enamoured by music history the moment I heard Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. The electrifying vibrant, luminous notes captivated my young heart and it made me want to learn the violin at 4 years old, and I’ve played ever since! In case you were wondering: Vivaldi and the radiant pulse of Baroque music have remained my steadfast companions on the violin.
Alongside the violin, the piano has also been my greatest companion. In fact, truly, this was my first moment of truly being in love. Playing the piano is, for me, an anchor in stormy seas forever and always.
I lose myself most deeply in the shimmering worlds of Debussy and Ravel, though any piece into which I can pour my heart becomes a balm for my soul is my sanctuary where time slows and healing blooms.
PS: Curious to hear more of my musical taste? I made this playlist for you!
As for art history, my earliest and most profound memory was visiting Monet’s garden as a child. This trip was nothing short of transformative. It awakened in me a profound love for art history and for the Impressionists, a passion that has never waned!
To this day, Monet’s garden remains my most cherished sanctuary in the whole world, a place where I retreat often to drink deeply from its quiet beauty and to remember how wonder feels.
When it comes to literature, my earliest and most treasured literary love was, without question, Beatrix Potter.
Growing up in the Wirral, our frequent pilgrimages to the Lake District allowed me to wander the very landscapes she brought to life. The rolling hills, the quiet woods, the gentle creatures who live there.
Beatrix Potter’s stories and illustrations shaped my childhood imagination; at school, I was always weaving little tales and painting pictures, much like she did. Till this day, this quiet bond between art and nature that still pulses within me.
Alongside this, I found a kindred spirit in the world of Jane Austen, the grace of period dramas, and the unending well of poetry.
Poetry, in particular, has also become my constant companion. Whenever I go into hospital, I carry it with me as a trusted tether to beauty and hope. In fact, I never ever leave the house without a poetry book, a journal, or some form of quiet writing in hand!
In essence, my childhood became steeped in song, in paint, in theatre: from My Fair Lady to West Side Story, I adored the stage’s alchemy and the way sight and sound and soul came together in luminous harmony.
So, with all this being said, as you can tell, I followed that thread. I studied the arts. But as I stepped into university lecture halls with my heart wide open, I encountered a cruel truth: I had to choose. Art or music or literature.
But why should we ever be asked to sever what the soul knows to be sacredly entwined?
And so, like a quiet rebellion, I began stitching them back together. On my own terms. With Kandinsky as my guide, who once wrote:
“Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings.”
Yes, I thought. Yes. This is what I feel.
The Girl Behind Beauxoxo
In the midst of academic frustration, and the aching loneliness that so often shadows the tender-hearted, I found myself adrift.
As a teetotal, sensitive soul at university, I was surrounded by a binge-drinking culture that felt worlds away from who I was.
Most nights, sleep eluded me, stolen by the din of rowdy students beyond my paper-thin walls. But within that sleepless silence, something quietly bloomed.
Rooted to my tiny university room, I began to craft delicate hair accessories by hand and as a balm for my weary spirit and anxious hands.
At that time, I had begun to suffer with a mysterious constellation of debilitating symptoms. Everything from waves of exhaustion, pain, and hormonal unease that kept me bedroom bound, wrapped in confusion and fear. I didn’t yet know what was happening to my body, only that I needed gentleness, and beauty, more than ever.
Hair accessories became more than adornments. They became my armour, my poetry, my voice when I could not speak.
When getting dressed became an effort, slipping on a headband I had made with love became a ritual of self-honouring. That quiet devotion, stitched in solitude, blossomed into Beauxoxo, my very first creative business, and a shimmering lifeline back to myself.
Perhaps you have been on a journey with me since this period of time? If so, please let us reconnect in the comments!
After a few years, and still at University, I was selling across the South Coast, opening an Etsy shop, and being invited to the Clothes Show Live, where Little Mix wore my creations on national TV. My creations also appeared in Elle, Marie Claire, and on the heads of beloved YouTubers like Zoe Sugg. It was a whirlwind few years but my anchor in my loneliest, most aching years.
Simultaneously during this time I launched a blog: Georgie xoxo, a digital haven for whimsy, wonder and my online tapestry of living a life of enchantment. There is so much I could say about my blog but this is a whole post in itself. But with all my heart: blogging opened the door to every single blessing I have in my life. Since 2009 it has become a home for my words when I didn’t quite know where I belonged.
However, during this time, my body was telling another story…..
During those heady years of business and glitter bows (what I became especially known for!), I was diagnosed with a benign pituitary tumour (a Prolactinoma), along with PCOS and Endometriosis.
Then, years later, came Scleroderma (a rare, painful autoimmune disease that slowly took the dexterity from my hands amongst other things) and Gastroparesis.
The grief was unspeakable when I was finally diagnosed with Scleroderma. I had built a life, literally with my hands, and suddenly they no longer moved the way they once had. So, I had to say goodbye to Beauxoxo.
But what the dark closed, the soul reopened.
After I closed Beauxoxo in 2019, I entered a quiet liminal space, not quite an ending, not yet a beginning. I knew I longed to share my love for the arts, and in my eagerness, I tried to force that dream (and truly, an identity that I still was worthy to the world as someone who could create another business) to bloom too soon.
In 2020, I called my new vision Painting Music and Art, and I imagined it as a place to teach art history to children and home schoolers.
The idea came during the swells of the pandemic, a time when the world, like me, was craving beauty, learning, and sanctuary. The demand was immense, the need undeniable, but deep down, something within me still felt unsaid.
The deepening of my Scleroderma invited me more inward than before. It slowed me enough to hear the music in the silence again. I began to remember the girl who believed the arts were not separate streams, but one wild, enchanted river.
As the seasons passed, I realised I wasn’t yet allowing my full self to be seen. I was offering knowledge, yes, but not the imagination, reverence, or romantic devotion that live at the very centre of my being.
I had spent so long believing that side of me, the part that dreams, loves and writes in metaphor was too much (because my writing style was always mocked at University). But the truth is, that part of me is the very soul of it all.
I didn’t want to simply teach art and music. I wanted to enchant. To awaken. To create a home for the poetic-hearted. For those who also see divinity in Monet’s lilies, who feel their pulse quicken at a phrase from Debussy, or who once read Beatrix Potter and felt their spirit ache to live in a soft, mossy world of wonder. I wanted to gather those kindred spirits who see the arts not as dry history, but as portals to magic, to memory, to meaning.
Here, I can finally gather every glimmer I’ve ever loved: Romantic poetry and Pre-Raphaelite paintings, baroque sonatas and whispered fairy tales. This is not a place of pressure or perfection. It is a sacred shelter for poetic and sensitive souls, for those who wish to live more slowly, more soulfully, more beautifully.
As Kandinsky so perfectly wrote, I wanted to ‘create vibrations in the soul.’
And thus, the Academy of the Enchanted Arts was born and now is living and breathing as a sanctuary for creative spirits who long not only to learn about the great creatives of history, but to embody the same wonder, imagination, and sacred devotion in their own lives.
Why I’m Writing to You & What The Letters from the Library Are
As my Substack is in the very earliest stages of gestation, I wanted to write this first post to formally introduce The Letters from the Library that will be a quiet place for us to meet intimately and openly.
In essence, Letters from the Library is a collection of soul-essays, personal reveries, and poetic meanderings from my writing desk to yours.
Each letter in this series is written as though I were placing it gently into your palm with a hot wax seal! Here, I will share my innermost reflections. On beauty, on illness, on creativity, on longing, and what it means to live a life steeped in wonder.
Think of Letters from the Library as the soul’s corner. It will be less about syllabus and more about soul. It is where you and I meet not as teacher and student, but as kindreds, candlelit across the page.
Through these letters, I will tell you more about the Academy, about the artists and composers and writers who feel like friends. I’ll share the journey that brought me to light academia, and how I realised, with a deep inhale, that it was the soul-home I’d been seeking all along.
If you’ve found your way here, you are already part of something enchanted. Whether you are a student, a dreamer, a sensitive soul, or simply someone who wishes to live more meaningfully: you are welcome here.
But for now, I simply wanted to say:
Welcome to my library.
Welcome to the Academy.
Welcome home.
With love and enchantment,
Georgie xoxo
Founder of the Academy of the Enchanted Arts
Categories: : Letters From The Library