“Announcing SAOIRSE by @charleen_hurtubise, a powerful novel set between the United States and Ireland about a woman who runs from her traumatic past and the secrets she carries to survive. Coming February 24, 2026.”
With artwork by me!
See more original paintings of Donegal here
Summer in Donegal is full of light. Even if its damp summer there is still lots of light. The northly latitude sees to that. It only seems to get properly dark for a couple of hours after midnight and dawn comes impossibly soon. So its great for painting and getting out and about but the light is not so interesting for photography or sketching, especially if, like me, you like lots of strong shadows. So my paintings are usually based on images that are captured in the autumn months. Otherwise, mornings and evening are best for interesting colours and shadows.
Cruit Island is one of my favourite places in Donegal. It’s rocky and sparsely populated but is accessible by a handy bridge.
We have driven past the collection of farm buildings at Cruit Lower many times but I only managed to capture an image I liked enough to paint this spring. It was an uncharacteristically warm and sunny run of days this May.
The farm has long fascinated me as you have to drive through it. These through roads through farms are not unusal in rural areas in Ireland (and Wales). Informal tracks through a collection of farm buildings, now divided by tarmac.
Lower Cruit was for sale last year and I had a good look at it online. It was interesting as you can only glimpse some of the buildings from the road. I cant remember how much the asking price was. Getting on for a million Euro, maybe. Way out the reach of a poor artist! You got a lot for that; a collection of beautiful historic buildings (some pre-famine era) and access to a beautiful beach and some really incredible views of the West of Donegal. Here are some of the photos from the website. I dont know who bought it but I really hope they look after the beautiful old buildings.
More information about Cruit Lower
https://www.buildingsofireland.ie/buildings-search/building/40904015/cruit-lower-co-donegal
1901 census information http://donegalgenealogy.com/1901cruitlowr.htm
https://www.donegalcottageholidays.com/cruitisland-cruitisland
https://www.booking.com/city/ie/kincaslough.en-gb.html
“Is this a fast painting or a slow one?” My husband asks.
This question gives me pause.
“A fast one” I reply.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Flying Fruit Bowl Instagram account
DIRECT DOWNLOAD: https://open.acast.com/public/streams/65a7aa539b536b00171d8ee3/episodes/67acc03e9c6f7f7f2859bc1a.mp3
APPLE MUSIC: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-flying-fruit-bowl/id1548279888
SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/episode/02nik9zJGEU7zLMtPzIjih
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.
I have explored different approaches to this subject matter. I have used a design-style – where the colours are flat and very simplied.
To a more less-stylish and realistic approach, with softer colours.
To a semi-realist approach with elements of stylished flat colours.
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.
Buy Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) paintings here
Find out More
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.
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
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.
A tingle goes down my spine, looking at it. This is what art is meant to do. It’s even better in real life.
Look at Van Gogh’s painting of a rainy day in Auvers. I have never seen better rain (and I have lived in Wales and Ireland – very wet places).
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.
“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.
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.
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.
Just a reminder that I am offering 20% off all my paintings on my website until 14th October with a code.
Join my mailing list to get the code here.
Read More about the study
https://www.mauritshuis.nl/meisje/#Waarom-dit-onderzoek
