Emily Thing is an abstract painter living and working in New York. Her paintings have been shown in galleries and juried shows throughout the New England Area and Hudson Valley Region. She's had her work published in both national and local magazines including American Artist, a two page spread in The Guide Magazine's June 2005 issue, and was featured in an article in the January 7, 2010 edition of the Kingston Times.
Always deeply affected by her natural surroundings: rock formations, plants, animal shapes and their varying personalities inform her work. Drawing and painting since early childhood, she was chosen for a workshop for developing artists in grade school. After excelling in an Advanced Placement program in high school, she was awarded a partial scholarship to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, where she earned her BFA. Further studies in painting and mixed media were completed at Cooper Union in New York City.
Emily kept New York City as a home base from 1992 to 2000. During that time she traveled as much as time and money would allow throughout North America, Europe and Asia keeping sketchbooks of ideas for paintings. Discovering distant places is another major inspiration for her work, and her paintings often include shards of paper that she collects along the way. In the fall of 2000, yearning for the quiet and sanity of nature on a full time basis, she moved into a little cabin on Ohayo Mountain in Woodstock, New York. Here she was able to recover from a debilitating illness. Making art - of one kind or another - has always been a huge source of hope in dark times for Emily - and brought her salvation when traveling on the road back to health.
In 2008 she welcomed the birth of her daughter, Liliana, and now lives and works in Kingston, New York - her original hometown.
Statement
Discovering landscapes or cityscapes during travel and being surrounded by nature at home have become some of the most engaging subjects for me as an artist. In recent paintings, my work is inspired by the tactility of place. The subject can range from the last bit of twilight forcing its way through the woods around my home, to the way personal items of another culture hang on a decaying wall. I'm drawn to found objects within these specific places which I then bring back to my studio to help me recreate a scene primarily from sense memory and intuition. My aim is to distill the strongest impression I had during the moment of experience into an abstract symbol or symbols representing, for me, the "whole".
Rather than rendering form, the work is deliberately kept within the two-dimensional picture plane. Instead, my concern has been for mood and light qualities, surface texture, value in color contrasts, and for the materials themselves. I'm working with a variety of collage elements and oil or acrylic paint on canvas or wood.