Currently Emery is an artist in residence with Chashama.org and also serves as the Department Chair for Visual Arts & Art History at the Dwight-Englewood School in New Jersey. A sketch artist, as well as painter, Emery’s artwork is featured in in the permanent collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Learn more at about his work HERE.

1. What’s the biggest, most personally fulfilling dream you’ve achieved to date?

As vague as it may seem, I really feel like I live life to its fullest more and more each and every day.  The past year was full of many things that could have derailed me, personal hardships & failures but I allowed it to fuel me to push further, deep within and outside myself, this show, the response, even the people who helped make it possible to achieve a solo exhibition of this size and strength is a huge dream fulfilled.

2. Were there any major challenges or obstacles that stood in your way? How did you break through them?

Divorce, lacking resources, even surgery that had me in crutches for 6 weeks, everything little and even the big things in my way always reminded me that others have it worse, all I really ever wanted was to be able to draw each day, (my personal form of prayer, my connection/ communication with something bigger than myself) gives me the strength to keep seeing the beauty in even the smallest thing.

3. How do our dreams benefit the world?

It gives us something to believe in, art, apart from all the other things it does, I think really helps me and others to slow down.  But dreams?  Everyone can have a dream, get up in the morning, work through the day and lay your head down at night with that dream to bring a smile to your lips or just keep you motivated to keep moving forward.

4. What energizes you to keep moving towards realizing your dreams?

A lot of times it’s people, sometimes just the simple interactions that happen when I’m out drawing in public. Just this morning I was drawing on the subway, tired when a little boy next me said to his mother, ‘I like that drawing, I want to buy it.’Mother: Some things aren’t for sale. New Yorker sitting on other side of me: Everything has its price. When the mother said next stop, the boy looked up at me and said, ‘I’d give you $50,000 dollars for that drawing.’ I took it out of the sketchbook as they left the car and handed it to the boy saying,’you can owe me.’ Those moments happen all the time when I’m drawing and just feeling connected with the small details and the larger world all in the same moment.