The Imaginaries
Little Scraps of Larger Stories
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Best-selling author/illustrator of The Wonderful Things You Will Be, Emily Winfield Martin, shares her "Imaginaries": paintings from over the last ten years, captioned with one enigmatic sentence, designed to inspire.
From mermaids and giant flowers to magical robes and mysterious characters, this full-color collection of old and new art from Emily Winfield Martin will inspire the artist and writer in you! Each glorious image is given a mysterious or magical one-line caption--the beginning of a story, or maybe the middle--you imagine the rest.
The captions are hand-written on vintage scraps of paper, envelopes, postcards and more. Akin to the Chris van Allsburg book The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, The Imaginairies is destined to become a cult classic in its own right.
The book is unjacketed with foil and a matte finish on the cover; a treasure to keep and display and pore over for years.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I found them, or maybe they found me," Martin (Snow & Rose) writes in an introductory note about the fragments, which she says she came upon in surprising places. In this album, pages feature enigmatic handwritten notes on creamy envelopes and other scraps of paper opposite exquisitely painted animals and doll-like women and children in fanciful dress, expressions of doubt on their faces. A note across from a woman dressed in a silk robe reads, "Her/ heart was the/ kind that beat/ like a bird's/ wings." In some paintings, animals a lion, an ibis, a bat pose with human figures, offering silent companionship. In others, humans wear masks ("She always wanted/ to be/ a bear"). Romantic seascapes carry silent menace as gigantic sea creatures threaten three-masted schooners: "Where/ they were going,/ there were no maps," one note says ominously. Throughout, the human characters appear poised and self-conscious, as if awaiting further instructions. Only a few a girl who confronts a sea monster, another who rides a bat at night seem to have plans of their own. It's a stirring sheaf of variations on the theme of luxurious eccentricity. Ages 8 12.
