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Emily Eve Weinstein Saving Magic Places
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| I looked forward to starting my new project, Magic Places, with great anticipation. I envisioned a year or two of painting vacation spots, remarkable gardens, and other oddities of man and nature.
My plans changed dramatically, however, when I learned that my first magic place was in jeopardy. 100 acres of pristine stream and forest located across the road from my studio were slated for development. Plans for the new subdivision involved altering natural stream beds, cutting old-growth forest, and destroying irreplaceable wildlife habitat. At this point, the project became Saving Magical Places, and what had begun as a simple artistic journey was transformed into something much bigger: an all-out battle to secure a corridor of contiguous, protected forest that extends for more than 35 miles. In the process, I learned that the spirit and will to protect our planets threatened natural resources extend to millions of visionaries around the world.
Saving Magical Places tells the story of how one group of friends and neighbors struggled valiantly to protect local forest from demolition. The struggle began with a modest handful of people but quickly grew to involve thousands. The journey took many convoluted turns shaped by the personalities and talents of the many players who participated in noteworthy ways. As a participant in the project, the paintings and text represent my take on it all. Also included are the voices, recollections and viewpoints of others on the journey. By combining paintings with text, I hope to inspire and encourage readers to work to save the natural beauty around them. It can and must be done.
The appendices provide details, descriptions and information and offer advice and examples of how to proceed, and what to expect, with a project like ours. In addition, the final appendix offers useful contact information for those who are contemplating or are already on the way to committing to an environmental project.
Above all, the purpose of Saving Magical Places is to recognize and join the universal desire to champion and protect our natural world. This book invites its reader/viewer to be one with the growing multitudes who are saving magic places.
Emily Eve Weinstein
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The extremely prolific output of Chapel Hill painter Emily Eve Weinstein is also geared toward providing a redemptive experience for viewer, although she is largely motivated by her concern for the dwindling natural habitats of North Carolina. Weinstein is a master of portraiture, landscape, murals, and just about everything else that involves paint. She has published four books of her paintings and drawings, the most recent of which is calledSaving Magic Places, and these pictures will be on display in the Woodson Gallery. Saving Magic Places began as Magic Places, a project involving paintings of vacation spots, remarkable gardens, and other outdoor wonders. But it turned out that her first magic place was in jeopardy; 100 acres of pristine stream and forest across from her studio were slated for development. Her concern for the wildlife habitat that would be destroyed in the development changed her focus on the project, and led to Weinstein collaborating with many other concerned citizens and organizations in order to preserve the area. Saving Magic Places is the story, in words and pictures, of that struggle.
Weinsteins prodigious output is a product of her energy, and that energy is evident in her paintings as well as in her relentless pursuit of the cause in which she believes. Bold brushstrokes, emphatic color schemes and powerful, evocative compositions show the command Weinstein holds of the medium in which shes worked her entire life. In her hands, a quiet woodlands scene becomes full of movement, tension and, almost, of anxiety. The urgency with which Weinstein paints is appropriate to the nature of her objective, and the knowledge of possible destruction creates a palpable sense of unease throughout the paintings. These works, while complete and resolved in and of themselves, are a call to action for any viewer who is aware of the peril facing our natural habitats.
Emily Eve Weinstein has had a consummate artists career, studying at the Academie Charpintier in Paris, the West Surrey College of Art and Design in Farnham, England, and receiving her BFA from the prestigious Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. She has exhibited widely through the South and abroad. She is the recipient of many grants and awards, and is included in many important collections. In addition, Weinstein has published three other books, operated a gallery, lived and painted out of a mobile studio for three years, painted dozens of public murals, operated an art gallery and been an integral part of the establishment of the New Hope Creek Park Reserve, the subject of Saving Magic Places.
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