Visit Erin’s Studio

Q&A with Erin

1. What is your chosen medium?

I am an artist working with photography, encaustic beeswax, and bookbinding. With my photography, I explore the elasticity of light, and combine photography transfer with encaustic beeswax to create soft imagery with a luminous glow. With my bookbinding, I explore structural form and complex bindings, and design encaustic journals to honor books as an art form.

2. How did you start your career in art?

I studied art at Miami University, Ohio, and graduated with an M.A. in Art Education. I taught visual arts at Brevard Middle School for twelve years and assumed it would be my lifelong career. Along the way, I met a bookbinder who was close to my age, and she made a living as a full-time artist. Ironically, my first impression was that bookbinding was boring (!) but once I made my first book, I fell in love, cartwheels and all. By coincidence my bookbinding journey began around the same time as my encaustic journey. Nine years into my own full-time art career, it is fulfilling to see my encaustic and bookbinding facets commingle, converse, converge, and travel in unique, unexpected directions.

3. What informs your art?

I live in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Pisgah National Forest and spend most of my leisure time hiking, canoeing, camping, creek stomping, porch sitting, and star gazing. My adventures become embedded personally into my imagery. 

4. What jobs you have worked other than as a professional artist?

I worked at LaRosa’s Pizzeria in the suburbs of Cincinnati throughout high school and college. I was a terrible waitress! I’m surprised they kept me employed for so many years!

5. What questions do you ask yourself when starting to work?

It’s not exactly a question, but the artwork has to feel “right” to me, from sketch to finished piece. I want to be 100% in love with it, and I always hope someone else will likewise be 100% in love with it.

6. Do you have a quote that’s important to you displayed in your studio?  If so, what is it?  

Prepare to be lucky.

7. Which artist (living or not) would you most like to invite for dinner? What would you serve?

I am intrigued by the local book artist Daniel Essig but have not met him in person. I am not a superb cook, so rather than embarrass myself, I’d invite him to the French Broad Chocolate Lounge!

8.  What has been your most unusual request for your art?

I worked briefly in a conservation bindery, repairing damaged books. I was put to task working on a very old bible that had barely survived a flooding in a church basement. The bible had more than 1000 pages, and due to the flooding, and each one was folded into one another like intricate origami designs. My job was to carefully unfold each of the extremely delicate pages and flatten them for repair. It took months!

9. What music are you listening to these days?

I usually work in silence and listen to the muse in my head.

10. What is on your nightstand?

Right before shelter-in-place, I borrowed “The Creative Habit” by Twyla Tharp from the library, and I’m glad that we are not allowed to return books right now, because I’m on my second reading of it!