“Is this a fast painting or a slow one?” My husband asks.
This question gives me pause.
“A fast one” I reply.
Portnoo Colours (Donegal) by Emma Cownie
My paintings usually take days to complete. On average three days. A smaller one quicker. Commissions are still “slow” paintings.
Lately, though I have taken to completing paintings in a single sitting. This may well be several hours, but its a single sitting.
Rocky Ground Bun An Inver by Emma Cownie
The results are more sponanteous-looking. The process feels slightly out of control. Often I think “I have bitten off more than I can chew” here. But I stick with it. Years of painting have taught me to ignore the impulse to give up. To push on, even when when it looks a bit ugly.
There may well be things wrong; colours or details but they dont matter too much. I will alter them if they really bug me. Mostly I dont. The brush strokes are broken and incomplete. In some places they are deliberately rough. The canvas shows through in places. Often I am uncertain if I like the painting when I stop. Its usually a bit of a surprise. I have to fight my perfectionism.
Narin Rise, Donegal by Emma Cownie
I am racing ahead of my thoughts. Ahead of my critical mind that tells me its not good enough and to keep painting. Now I refuse to listen and keep going. It’s intense and exhausting.
Over Cruit Island, Donegal and painting by Emma Cownie
My father died in June this year. He was 92. My heart is broken. He was a lovely, funny and kind man and I miss him terribly.
I am delighted to announce that I have made Jacksons Art’s extended long list for their 2024 Art Prize. The list was announced on 14th but as I didnt get an email from Jacksons, I assumed I hadn’t made the cut. So imagine my delight when I find a “Congratulations” email that isn’t telling me I have won a load of bitcoin has arrvived in my inbox.
It reads “With 12,964 entries submitted, from 129 countries, the selection process was incredibly competitive. As an artist on the Extended Longlist of 3,168 works, you are in the top 25% of entries. The full list is available to view here. ” I am on page 5 if you want to look.
Carn (Donegal) – Bridge Street in Carndonagh, Donegal
Update
The excitement only lasted a morning. Turns out that my email provider had hidden the “Congratulations” in a folder it calls “Promotions” which is mostly emails from Art suppliers. It had been there for a week before I spotted it. Strange how I had no problems seeing the “Thank you for Taking Part” email yesterday afternoon. Oh, well.
I am delighted and honoured to have been interviewed by Aaron S (@aaronsehmar on Instagram) for his Flying Fruit Bowl podcast. If you haven’t come across his podcast and website check it out – he’s a thoughtful and insightful interviewer who is a very talented photographer in his own right. He’s interviewed a diverse range of talented artists. There is a lots to discover. It’s like a breath of fresh air.
I have been painting  Bannau Brycheiniog – the official name for the Brecon Beacons since 2023 – for a while now. Living in flat Cardiff as a student for a decade, I used to enjoy seeing Carphilly Mountain off in the distance. At weekends, I would catch the local train to Taffs Wells and climb Garth Mountain (Subject of the 1995 Hugh Grant film “The Englishman who Went up a Hill but down a Mountain“). Those mountains gave me a sense of very different landscape nearby.
The Mountains of south and mid-Wales was my favourite destination for days out and holidays. When I first started painting seriously, the Beacons were a favourite subject matter. When I used to sell prints on Artfinder back in 2013, “Crick in the Snow” was very popular. I loved painting the lines of hedges and trees. I have a fascination with layers of things – fields, hedgerows, houses. I think I enjoy seeing them spread out at a distance. It gives me a better sense of the toptography of the physical landscape. How the land undulates; rises and falls. I can look at a 2D images a create a 3D image in my mind’s eye.
Crick in the Snow 2013
I have explored different approaches to this subject matter. I have used a design-style – where the colours are flat and very simplied.
The Distant Beacons 2015 Autumn Beacons 2014
To a more less-stylish and realistic approach, with softer colours.
Beacons painting commission by Emma Cownie
To a semi-realist approach with elements of stylished flat colours.
Three peaks – Brecon Beacons painting commission
Recently, I was drawn to painting Wales again. I was looking to paint small landscapes using acrylic gouache. Using a different medium produced interesting results. The Acrylic Gouach is chalky in nature and tends to result in pastel shades. I like this. I found that the lighter colours (pale yellows and light greens) needed several layers to get the strength of colour I wanted. Each painting was a surprise to me. They did not turn out the way I expected but I liked them beacuse the softer colours were more respresentative of the landscape than the oils I used in the past.
Recent paintings of Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) – in Acrylic Gouache.
Hazy Beacons – Emma CownieDistant Sugar LoafTable Mountain, Crickhowell by Emma Cownie Summer in Mid WalesMid Wales
Buy  Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) paintings here
To Celebrate the New Year I am giving 30% off all work on my website – to get the discount you have to enter a code at the checkout. Where’s the code? Join my email list and it will be sent to you, automatically. The sale ends on 15th January.
View from the Pier (Portnoo)-Emma Cownie SOLD
If you have already joined my mailing list and haven’t had my latest newsletter with the sale code check your SPAM folder.
I know this isnt about Art, but at the moment Effie is taking up most of my waking time, so its an explanation as to why I havent been painting. Thinking about it, yes. Doing it, no.
We have had Effie for just over a month now.
What have a learnt about puppies in general and border collies (bc) in particular?
Puppies are exhausting. Unbelievably so. There are long threads devoted to this topic on message boards/forums where people will detail lack of their of sleep and exhaustion across many breeds. I have read more than once, that some people (women? men? It could be either to be honest) cried every night for a month after getting their “adorable” puppy. Have I cried? No, but I have certainly shouted at my husband from exhaustion more than once. Its getting better, slowly. BC are marmite dogs – they have legions of fans who adore them but the rescue shelters also have more than their fair share of abused collies.
What have I learnt about bc puppies
They are not like other dogs – they are very sensitive – especially to sound and dont like traffic or shouting
They will “go” all day if you dont make them have several naps during the day
They get cranky if they don’t have naps – Effie takes a longer than I would like to go to sleep for her afternoon nap.
They can chew ANYTHING but dont always want breakfast in the morning.
They do crazy digging before they go to sleep. They are meant to be making a bed but Effie NEVER sleeps on the spot where she’s been digging
They are REALLY clever – much smarter than any other dogs I have come across
They are free spirits (which means they may well refuse to do the thing they know how to do because they dont WANT to do it). What’s the word for that – stubborn? Perhaps I am not a worthy leader/owner/guardian? It’s a tough role to fill.
They LOVE company.
They also need quiet time.
They dont like strangers sticking their faces in theirs saying “How cute!” They can get really upset by that sort of thing.
They love to play games and will play on their own too. They are willing pupils so long as they like the treat (cheese is good).
If you dont find them a job to do, they will find their own. If it goes quiet its usually because she’s found something really good to chew.
Effie likes zips – on cushions, pillows, jeans – where ever she can find them. She also likes tassles. And hats, and tea towels. Most things really.
She is an excellent guard dog but doesn’t just bark her head off.
Effie gets hiccups a lot
Effie doesn’t hold grudges and every day is a new start!
It’s not until you film yourself painting that you realise just how long a painting takes. I *know* how long they take, usually several days, sometimes longer. Actually seeing the process makes you realise how painstaking and slow the whole process is. Its taken me a while how to work out how to do a timelapse film and its a joy to see the work “fly” along. This is how it feels to me as I am painting (when its going well). Of course, a film can’t capture all the standing back, breaks to change the water, to clean the palette, or just to *look* at the painting. That is a dedicated painting shirt, by the way. There’s a lot of paint on the front of it.
Nellie had been lying on the bed whilst I was painting and came over when I put the palette down. Flossie and Nellie have always taken a great interest in my painting. So much so that I have been reduced to using a small camping stool as they insisted on walking along the back of the chair I used. My water is in a small jam jar with a scew-on lid as Nellie frequently tries to drink the (probably toxic) paint water if I leave it unattended. The palette also has a lid to help keep it damp and keep playful paws away from the paint. They are a large part of the reason I paint in water-based acrylic paints these days instead of oils.
A long time ago, when I was a student, my favourite place to visit was the National Museum of Wales. The Davies collection in particular. The Davies were two sisters, Gwendoline and Margaret, amassed one of the greatest British art collections of the 20th century and bequeathed it (260 works!) to the National Museum of Wales. That’s Girl Power!
They had great taste. Those paintings became like my friends. I visited them often and spent a long time looking closely at them. They excited, inspired and comforted me. Even now when I look at reproductions of them online I have a strong reaction to them.
I used to think, this was because I was an artist. I remember peering closely at Monet’s brush strokes and marvelling at how they were laid down. I mean look at this.
The Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague, is the home of Vermeer’s ‘Girl with the Pearl Earring’. Thew museum recently did some academic research into how visitors responded to artworks. They looked at the neurological mechanisms and emotions underlying the appreciation of perception in art.
The study used EEG and eye-tracking measurements on 20 participants who followed a set route through the Mauritshuis. Five paintings were included on this route: Girl with a Pearl Earring (Johannes Vermeer), The Violin Player (Gerrit van Honthorst), Self-portrait (Rembrandt van Rijn), The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, (Rembrandt van Rijn), View of Delft (Johannes Vermeer). They also showed them reproductions of the originals and compared their responses. The EEG results showed that the real paintings created a stronger emotional response compared with the poster versions of the same paintings.
Volunteer in the study looking at “Girl with a Pearl Earing” – Her eye movements are being tracked
“The Girl with a Pearl Earing” created the biggest emotial response. Painting of “The View of Delf” did not score well, and I wondered whether it was because it was a landscape rather than a portrait, not as famous as the “Girl with the Pearl Earing” or people were not familar with the layout of Delf. I have spent a long time looking at historic paintings of London, Swansea and Derry, trying to work out how they relate to the modern day cities. But maybe that’s because I’m pretty geeky. I doubt I had a big emotional response to them, though. Not enough paint!
The EEG results confirm that real paintings (compared to poster versions) also elicited a strong need to approach the paintings. It wasn’t just me wanting to get a close look at the paint! Real art, including the surrounding ambience, lighting, frame also helped evoke an emotional reaction many times more powerful (10x more powerful according to this study) than looking at a poster of a painting.
Some of you will put that in the “No Sh*t, Sherlock” category of scientific “discoveries” – which was my husband’s response when I told him about the study.
I have never seen Vermeer’s painting in real life but my parents have a reproduction in a tiny gold frame. I don’t know if people’s reponses were elicited because its very beautiful, well-composed, very famous, or because its a human face. I suscpect its a combination of all three.
Mona Lisa in the Louvre – I dont remember it looking as big as this when I saw it back in 1988!
Seeing a famous painting isn’t always rewarding. Maybe you too went to the Louvre in Paris to see the Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and were underwhelmed. Its notoriously small and hard to see as it under glass , far away and surounded by tourists.
There have been times I have come across paintings that I didn’t know and looked at them for a long time. I sat in the Tate (in the 1980s way before it became Tate/Tate Modern) with a lot of Rothko paintings and felt incredibly moved. You just cannot convey that with a reproduction.
So I guess this is a round about way to encourage you to go and see art in real life. You will feel better for it. Possibly. I hope you have some sort of emotional response – tears, laughter, anger even. Barnett Newman, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III, 1967-68 has been slashed three times.
Barnett Newman, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III, 1967-68. Oil on canvas, 8′ x 18′
We can’t all own Monets and Vermeers (and I don’t think any of us should, they are too important for that) but we can be glad that museums hold them in public collections we can see. I would love to see Picasso’s Guernica in real life. I have had it projected on a class room wall when I have taught lessons about the Spanish Civil War – it is a powerfully brutal work. My board was large no where near the full the size of the painting which is 3.49 meters (11 ft 5 in) tall and 7.76 meters (25 ft 6 in) across. Art stimulates our senses, emotions, and intellect. Guernica was also designed to stimulate our empathy. It is as relevant today as it was when it was painted in 1937.
Cardiff National Museum let me visit the stores to see Robert Bevan’s Maples at Cuckfield in 2013, because my husband put in a request to see it after seeing in the gallery the year before after my car accident. This work inspired me to start painting again. It helped with my recovery from PTSD and burn out.
Seeing paintings in real life really does do you good. Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith has identified looking at art as a way of getting creative rest, one of seven types of rest all people need. Creative rest involves exposing yourself to sources of awe and inspiration and makes you better able to create and problem solve. Painting pictures is even better for you.
Have you seen this Apple advert? Take a moment to watch it. It makes my blood run cold. Surprisingly the tech bros at Apple thought it was a good idea to show this advert which depicts a tower of creative tools and analog items (like paint, trumpets and record players), being crushed into the form of the iPad. It’s a pretty grim vision of the future. It a good visual metaphor for what is happening to creatives right now.
This year has been the toughest year I have experienced as an artist, for a myriad of reasons, and the art market seems to be struggling generally. Yes there’s war in Ukraine and the Middle East (and elsewhere in the world) and “the Cost of Living Crisis” and terrible cold and wet weather in the British Isles hasn’t helped either.
It seems evident that it’s more difficult getting my work seen. I cant help but think that AI and the “enshitification of the internet” is at least partly responsible. I feel a bit like I am being slowly crushed by the Apple crusher. It’s sapping my creative juices. I don’t quite know what to do about it. Cory Doctorow explains how enshittification works “It’s a three-stage process: first, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, there is a fourth stage: they die.”
This is probably the reason why I can’t find any useful results on google – lots of top ranking website are full of AI nonsense. It’s also why fewer people are seeing my work on the internet. My posts are pretty much hidden on Facebook, Instagram and invisible on X. Images of my paintings do not show up on Google as much as they did say 3 or even 6 months ago. Many other artists report a similar decline in interest from potential customers.
I have started to visit my local library again in search of real books with in- depth facts. The only decent thing on Google these days is Wikipedia. I find that Youtube playlists are so random as to be useless and a search on Pinterest results in either pins I have seen before (in other words I have already saved them) or one unrelated to the search term I just used. Tech companies are burning up the planet with their massive data centres in the hope that one of them will “win” the AI battle and then charge us all for what used to be better quality and free.
What’s this got to do with you? Everything. Doctorow says that enshittification is coming for all industries. “From Mercedes effectively renting you your accelerator pedal by the month to Internet of Things dishwashers that lock you into proprietary dish soap, enshittification is metastasising into every corner of our lives. Software doesn’t eat the world, it just enshittifies it.” Think about your printer – a new printer is cheap as chips but the ink costs a fortune and you cant use non-proprietary ink and your printer will know, and refuse to work.
Corry Doctorow’s big hope is that “Stein’s Law will take hold: anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop…if everyone is threatened by enshittification, then everyone has a stake in disenshittification.” Actually, there’s a lot more to it than that. You’ll have to read his articles to find out what USA and EU are planning to do to break the monopolies of the big tech comapnies.
I just hope that independent artists like me survive the process or else everyone will have to console themselves with souless AI-derived art their ipad/smartphone/tablet device instead.
See below for some scary examples of AI “Art”. It’s a nonsense view of Derry if you didn’t know.
“Painting of Derry City by Emma Cownie” – Thanks AI. I can give up now. NOT.
Just in case some of you are saying. It’s Londonderry not Derry. AI is no better at conjuring up a view of Londonderry. Take a look! Although there is a river this time.
“Painting of Londonderry City by Emma Cownie”
How about Three Cliffs Bay? I have painted that many times. Sure AI will do better at ripping me off. Well, no.
Painting of Three Cliff Bay by Emma Cownie – Yes, it looks NOTHING like Three Cliffs Bay
Yes, we can laugh at AI’s efforts and say they look nothing like those places or my paintings but it’s all doing damage. AI can never replace human creativity. AI cannot suffer and struggle like humans. It just produces a wierd pastiche of the thing it is meant to be. It’s expensive rubbish. It’s costing us dearly. Emissions from data centers of the likes of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple may be 7.62 times higher than they let on.
We can reverse the enshittification of the internet. Don’t accept those tracking cookies. Try a different search engine. Stay on the website rather than downloading apps (you can use ad blockers on the website you can’t on the app). Don’t buy everything via Amazon if you can buy it in a real life shop.
We can halt the creeping enshittification of every digital device. Put down your phone/tablet and read a book or look at a painting made by a real human being. Join artists’ mailing lists so you can still follow their work no matter what the big platforms do to hide their work.
Oh, did I mention I have a 20% off sale on? Starting Sunday until Monday 14th. You have to join my mailing list for the code 20% code but you can unsubscribe at any time.
Here is the painting that finished me off. Now I look at it after a month, I am not sure why. I just felt like I had run into the sand and needed a change. I had been doing a lot of reading about composition but I suspect it had more to do with taking too long to paint. Acrylic paint often requires several layers to achieve the opacity of oil paint. I was getting bored and tired and I wanted to try something new. A change is a good as a rest.
Toralaydan Island, West Donegal
So I took a month off posting new work on facebook & instagram, to give myself head space. Some artists love being filmed live and showing their “process” – I am not like that. I get very self conscious and often will immediately screw up a painting if I take photos too early in its development. It’s one of the reasons I cannot bear to paint outside “en plein air” – people understandably want to see what you are painting and that makes me feel very self-conscious. I really dont know how people go on TV shows like “Landscape Artist of the Year” and produce really good paintings, or half-way decent paintings at all, in fact. They must have nerves of steel. I don’t. In fact, I know that many of my paintings can go through stages of looking quite rubbish before they (almost always) emerge butterfly-like from the murk and layers. It’s a lovely (and sadly rare) experience when a painting look interesting/beautiful all they way through the process of coming into being.
I had bought some tubes of Acrylic Gouache in the spring but had not got around to trying them out. Now I opened that box of paints and gave them my full attention. I had been looking for a water-based paint, to reduce the risk to my pets, especially my young inqusitive cats. I had had oil paint/white-spirit incidents with pets in the past when we had a lot more space and I did not want to take that risk now. I also wanted opaque paint. I had discovered that some American artists, whose work I liked, used Nova acrylics which is pretty opaque but they did not have a UK stockist. I was cautious about importing paints from the US as I once ordered a load of paint from a sale from JerrysArtsarama only to get stung by customs and VAT charges. So any saving I had made in the sale were wiped out! I also considered Golden SO FLAT matte acrylic paint but I am not a great fan of Golden colours. Dont get me wrong, some of their acrylic colours are great (light ultramarine for example) and I know many artists rave about them, but I don’t LOVE them. They were also sold in a jar rather than a tube, and I could just see me absent-mindedly sticking my dirty paint brush in a jar and mucking up the colour. I prefer tubes that I can squeeze a tiny bit of paint out onto my wet palette and keep my colours clean.
Not the set I bought – I wish!
I saw that Jacksons Art stocked Turner Acryl from Japan. I watched a couple of videos comparing different makes of Acrylic Gouache and liked the vibrancy of Turner’s paint. There is not a lot of information about acrylic gouache, unlike regular acrylic (I have several books on the technical aspects of using this acrylic). I keep reading the same thing – its a cross between gouache and acrylic. Gouache is a water-based paint which can be opaque (unlike water colours which are usually transculent) and it can be reactivated with water. Acrylic gouache, however, once dry, sets like acrylic and cannot be reactivated with water. It dries pretty quickly too. It dries to a smooth velvety matt finish too. It is used by illustrators, especially anime.
An example of anime art from Instagram from @happy.artistry
Look at the lovely rich colours!
The colours are lovely but I have a lot to learn. There are so many wonderful rich colours and I can see why these [paints are popular with illustrators. Unlike acrylics or gouache, there is little to no colour shift. It is non-toxic. It does not dry lighter or darker. I am finding this hard to get used too. I am overcautious about laying down darker colours. I have to learn this again and again. I often dont make my paintings dark enough as I am afraid the strong colour of the tarmac road will overwelm the painting. I have to repaint the shadows.
I feel out of control with it at times. Sometimes that is exciting, others just scary.
Winter Morning on Academy Road, Derry – Acrylic Gouache on wood Panel 2024 – An early effort
I painted a load of duff pieces before I started to feel I was getting somewhere with “Ardara”.
Ardara – Acrylic Gouache on Wood Panel 2024 – Another early effort
I felt that a new medium required new subject matter to set it apart from the rural scenes I had focused on since moving to Ireland in 2021. My work had previously described by Niall McMonagle in the Irish Independent as a “Clear bright glimpse of a vanishing Ireland”. I wanted to mix things up and paint a more contemporary version of everyday Irish life.
This meant scenes with cars. The Irish love their cars. I have painted cars in the past but not for a very long time. It was usually at night or in the rain (at night) so you could not really see them properly.
My Pop Art – The Driving Rain (SOLD) Oil on Linen Canvas, 2015
Coming out of Shell, Oil on Linen canvas (SOLD) 2020
It was in 2017 that I decided to pursue “Urban Minimalism” for my “Hollowed community” project for the MadeinRoath festival in Cardiff. For a long time, I have sought out empty scenes with no cars or people. It found it cleansing. The Morris Minor (below) was one of few exception to this. This vintage car was parked around the corner from our home in Brynmill. I used to hear the owner drive past our house on the way to the paper shop every morning.
Urban Minimal style – Morris Minor 2018 Oil on Linen Canvas (SOLD)
Now I decided on a volte face and to seek out street scenes with cars to challenge myself. Car are difficult to paint. I know some people will disagree with me, but in themsleves, they are not intrinsically beautiful, although the light reflected on their surfaces can be. I am more a fan of vintage cars like the Morris Minor and old-style minis (genuinely small cars) and enjoy the colours used by Italian manufacturers such as Fiat 500s. Too many cars in Ireland are black or grey. They don’t make for interesting compositions. Surprisingly, Lorries do. In the right place.
Deliveries on Queen Street, Derry – Acrylic Gouache on wood panel 2024
I wanted to paint with speed. I was bored of spending days or even weeks on a large painting. I wanted to work fast keep things fresh. I tried hard to resist overpainting. I left wobbly lines where possible so as to convey some of the energy of the urban areas.
Derry is a very lively city. I also wanted to explore town/city life on both sides of the border in Donegal and Derry, in Northern Ireland. The building stock is very different depending on which side of the border you are. The number plates maybe different but the cars are pretty similar.
Bogside, Derry – Acrylic Gouache on wood panel 2024
Light and shadows continue to be a theme in my work.
Carn (Donegal) – Acrylic Gouache on wood panel 2024
I have found this both challenging and exciting. I have produced quite a few paintings that didn’t work, especially at the start but I just pushed on. I knew that there would be a lot of wastage at the start. The only way I would get the hang of this medium was by painting a lot. I learn through my hands, mixing the paint and then placing the paint on the board. I have not yet achieved the consistency in my work I am used to with oils and acrylics.
I also had to deal with the fear that people might not like this style of paintings or the subject matter. That’s why I had to stay off social media until I felt like I knew what I was doing (sort of). I have shifted styles and subject matter before. There are themes I have focused on before and I am revisiting them. Others are constant – shadow and light. Strong dynamic compositions are also important.
I used to alternate larger landscapes with smaller people/animal paintings. This way I kept my interest in what I was painting. But I seem to get stuck painting landscapes when I came to Ireland. I am not sure it was good for me as an artist. I need to mix things up to keep them fresh. I don’t know where I am going with this but I feel I need to persue this trail for a while longer. I just have to keep going to see where I end up.
