25 Year Handmade Book Series by Emily Eve Weinstein

This article provides you with a glimpse inside Volume IV of my 25-year Handmade Book Series. Every year I take a lot of the art I’ve done, write about it, and turn the adventure into a book. Within the following paragraphs is a snippet of how the fourth volume of the 25-year Handmade Book series is coming along. This is the fourth year of the all-encompassing project. The subject was obvious: 4 seasons, perfect, as my primary mode of painting is plein air.

It would’ve been lovely if I’d had a peaceful existence of spending my work hours in the great outdoors! But, packing the French easel as I head for the door, a variety of things stop me. From a strongly recommended stay in a sleep lab, to parents having scary illnesses, to our failing dog…  life happens. To get my work done I had to have a vision, a plan to navigate through the daily obstacles: being diagnosed with sleep apnea, migraines, weekly veterinarian appointments, interspersed with the carpet cleaner. My writing gets done in 500 word chunks at 5 AM.  As I try to sleep, I envision the painting series I plan to do, so that when it actually happens it all flows like a déjà vu.

The Treetop series of nine paintings (3 small, 3 medium, and 3 large) were done in layers. I used a paint sprayer for the very smooth background of sky, made up of about eight layers from palest lavender to deep cerulean. When I finished with the acrylic under-coats, I moved onto oils and placed the first layers of branches across the three canvases. The triptychs were worked on simultaneously. With ever-present interruptions, completing a segment gives a certain sense of satisfaction, rather than insanity. For instance, when I had to fly up to New York City in a moments notice, this series was easy to pick up where I had left off.

A fellow Womancraft member asked me to join her in an exhibit in the Highlight Gallery. Having just finished the Treetop series, this sounded like a good opportunity to focus on smaller spring paintings.

The spring images fell into four series: Irises on reclaimed wood, New Green (representing new leaves), Rooftops (mini relatives to the Treetop series), and the fourth is Spring Alive (which are small oils on boomerang panel with a vibrant orange under-painting, making them very alive!) There are twenty-five pieces in all. With summer visitors streaming in, a fundraiser that falls on my skinny shoulders, and then torrential rains, it’s a contest as to which keeps me from the plein air painting I’d planned to do for Volume IV of the 25-year Handmade Book series. Currently I envision being at the Eno River finally to do my illustration for Shelly Hehenberger’s RIVER book project. This past week, Womancraft flooded, as if a river had come through the store , not the kind of waterway I had planned to paint for the RIVER book. Being stuck inside due to the rains has shaped my 4th book of the series.