16-year-old Chloë Feldman Emison pursues her muse with a little help from mom

Most 14-year-olds spend their time away from school playing video games and watching television. When Lee resident Chloë Feldman Emison was 14, she illustrated a 321-page book that her mother wrote called “Growing with the Grain,” an encyclopedic history of influential families that spans from ancient Greece to the present.

Now 16, Chloë is preparing for a solo art show at Tara Peck Gallery at 39 Ceres St. More than 100 of Chloë’s ink and watercolor drawings, almost all measuring no larger than 4 inches by 6 inches, will be displayed from Dec. 7 through Jan. 8. The show is titled “Scenes of Childhood,” with each brightly colored miniature showing different whimsical characters and settings.

“I’ve been drawing since I can remember,” Chloë says. She sold her first piece of art at age 6, and has only taken one art class in her life. Patricia Emison, Chloë’s mother, is a professor of art history and humanities at the University of New Hampshire and has home-schooled both Chloë and her 10-year-old sister, Linnea, through their entire school careers.

“Students coming into college don’t know basic things they should know,” Emison says. “I wanted to find some way to get Chloë into history and nonfiction, to make it fun to learn a range of history.” Eighteen months of effort produced “Growing with the Grain,” in which Chloë’s straightforward pen-and-ink portraits illustrate each of the 60 portraits. It took her an entire summer to draw the historiated initials that begin each biography (such as the one that begins this article).

“Growing with the Grain” is intended for a wide audience. The text is thoroughly researched, but not dry and academic, and Emison shows the links between families so that readers can understand the ways in which history is full of connections. The suggestions for further reading include some selections for children, as well as adults. 

“I think middle school is a great age group for this book,” Emison says. The text is easy enough to follow that parents can read it to their children. “We’ve lost a lot of that,” she says.

Most of the pictures in the book are of an adult posed with a child, such as Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft (who wrote “A Vindication on the Rights of Women”) posed with her daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (who wrote “Frankenstein”). Other recognizable names include Darwin, Alcott, Freud and Benazir Bhutto. Chloë researched each figure in order to accurately draw them.

“Sometimes I found portraits or photographs of the most recent families on the Internet,” Chloë says. “But I had to guess for a lot of the children who never had their portraits painted.”

Making the book was truly a family affair, with UNH math professor and father David Feldman converting the pictures and text to camera-ready copy, and Linnea helping out with proofreading. “The idea got bigger as time went on,” Emison says. “We included more families and did more illustrations.”

The mother-daughter team ultimately decided to print the book at Allegra Printing in Portsmouth and had it bound at Acme Bookbinding in Charlestown, Mass. The book is officially published under the name “Lady Illyria Press,” in honor of the character Illyria in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” and also because it’s one of Chloë’s four middle names.

Outside of her work with “Growing with the Grain,” Chloë almost never draws from life or photographs. “I make it all up in my head,” she says. “Doing the book improved how I draw people. I never used to draw men.” A Calvin and Hobbes fan from an early age, Chloë is also familiar with a wide range of art history. She likes everything from Edward Gorey to the pre-Raphaelites.

For the past 18 months, Chloe has been working in color, filling in the lines of her pen and ink drawings with watercolor paint. The show at Tara Peck will concentrate on Chloe’s watercolor drawings, a medium she is still exploring.

Published in 2005, “Growing With the Grain” was printed in a limited edition of 500 copies, with each one covered in a fragile paper jacket emblazoned with gold text. “We had delusions of grandeur, I think,” Emison says. The book is available for $45 at Water Street Books and Time of Wonder, both in Exeter, and the UNH Bookstore in Durham. Though the book may not be flying off the shelves, Emison is happy that Chloë learned so much while making it.

“I wanted to show her that the past is populated with real people and real problems,” Emison says.
“I was able to see how everything is connected,” says Chloë, who recently took the PSATs and is beginning to think about college.

Chloë’s other interests include ballet, knitting and sewing, and playing the violin. She plans to wear a homemade dress to her opening reception at Tara Peck Gallery (Dec. 8 from 5 to 8 p.m. as part of Art ’Round Town), and is a “fanatic” about movies from the 1930s and ’40s. 

Chloë’s work has also been shown at the Salmon Falls Village Gallery in Rollinsford, and her next gallery exhibit will be a group show in Exeter, at the Burlingame Gallery, Jan. 10 through Feb. 18. She expects to pursue art well into her future. “I remember when she was very small we had to bribe her to be patient at museums,” says Emison. “At some point, she started to like it.”