It makes you wonder whether being an artist is really in the genes, especially when you learn that Emily’s great-grandmother was, just like her, her mother, and her grandmother before her, also an artist. Though, if we’re looking at nature then we should probably explore nurture too and, in that regard, surrounded by art enthusiasts, so too was the mind of young Emily’s able to flourish. ‘I used to draw all the time growing up’, she tells me, ‘Though I wouldn’t copy the trees I was drawing but just make them up’. Indeed, it is Emily’s imaginative streak that has often been the catalyst for her artistic one. As you’ll see, her work itself is not only imbued with magical elements, but also her very process.
Following her passion for painting growing up, Emily decided to study and refine her skills as an artist by studying for an Arts degree once she left school. Though, it wasn’t long however, like most graduates, until she felt a bit lost. ‘I didn’t really know what I was doing’, she tells me, ‘until one day I went to a local arts festival’. For it was here, whilst she was wondering around the tourist centre, that Emily encountered a notice board. On it, alongside all the other various leaflets, was an advertisement by a company that ran artistic workshops looking for artists to feature in their gallery. So, being the creative that she is, Emily decided to give it a go and submitted her work. ‘I arrived and could see that they were making these huge willow boats’, she says, ‘and I just thought “oh no this isn’t what I do at all” but they said not to worry as they weren’t complicated to make, and they then put some of my graduate work into their opening show’. Yet here was the unexpected breakthrough she needed, as this was an opportunity that allowed her not only to show case her artwork but continue to broaden and enhance her artistic skillset. For eight years Emily would spend not only painting things such as murals, but also learning how to design costumes and even craft the willow boats that she had seen when she first arrived. Fortunately, another company she had met through the workshops also then hired her as a freelance artist, a vocation which she continues to perform twenty years later. Only now, whilst she still classes herself as a painter, paint isn’t actually the medium she uses to create most of her designs.
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