Acrylics Archives – Emma Cownie

Posted on September 28, 2024September 29, 2024 by emma cownie — 15 Comments

20% off sale

20 Sale off Emma Cownie paintings until 14th October 2024 with code

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.

Shifting Shadows on Three Cliffs Bay (Gower) Context — Shifting Shadows on Three Cliffs Bay (Gower) -Emma Cownie which is also in the sale (with the code)

Read more

Cory Doctorow on Enshittification of the Internet – https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/27/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse/

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/15/data-center-gas-emissions-tech

Posted on June 9, 2024June 9, 2024 by emma cownie — 5 Comments

At the edge of the world – Malin Head, Donegal.

Star of the BBC Shipping Forecast

The name will be familar to British ears who ever listened to the daily shipping forecast on BBC Radio. It is broadcast late at night just before 1 am and very early (5.20am). Anyone who is a night owl or insominiac will have listened to it. The list of shipping zones and forecasts is not only practical but also poetic and rather mysterious. Following the litany of locations and numbers is very soporistic. Listen to the clip below. The actual broadcast is from 2.46 onwards ZZzzzzzzzzz

Shipping Forcast (1993) – almost always broadcast on the radio, you have to use your imagination!

Many British people may not know where Malin Head it is anymore than than they know the location of German Bight or Viking. To Irish ears, however, it is well-known as the most northerly tip of the island of Ireland and also features on Met Eireann’s, sea area forecast, broadcast on RTE.

800px-UK_shipping_forecast_zones — UK_shipping_forecast_zones

Malin Head to Mizen Head

People regularly tranverse the length of Ireland from Malin Head, Donegal, to Mizen Head, Cork. It’s a fair stretch. Just under 400 miles (640 km). Some incredible people have cycled it in just over 15 hours. Ordinary mortals take about 4 days.

Amazingly some super-human runners have done it in about the same time – 4 days! I recently listened to a radio interview with the heroic Sophie Power. Sophie is from England and she recently ran the length of Ireland in under 4 days. This is a World Record. She beat the previouis record by three hours. Being a mother, she had to fit it in during her children half-term holiday and didn’t get to pick the day with the nicest weather – just the Tuesday of half-term and so she started off in driving rain! Many years ago I used to run (only piddly 10ks and 5ks) and I would certainly prefer to run in rain than heat.

Incredibly Sophie ran most of the distance without sleep, snatching the odd half an hour on her second and third day. She ended up hallucinating, and with a knee injury that had to be braced. When she finished the race in Cork she had developed heat stroke! That alone shows you how far south Cork is. There’s no way she’d get heat stroke in Donegal! She’s planning to come back and run the Cork Marathon.

At the Edge of the world

Standing at Malin Head is like standing at the edge of the world. To the north is nothing can be seen but sky and sea. A long way off is Iceland and much. much further away to the north-west is North America. It feels very remote (but surprisngly accessible from Letterkenny and Derry/Londonderry) but to fishermen and sailors, I’m sure it’s not. Scotland is surpisingly close to the north-east. If you have ever flown from England to Belfast on a clear day, you can see the Scottish Isles and the Isle of Man scattered across the Irish Sea, pretty close the Antrim coast. Donegal is just a bit further along.

Painting of Crashing Waves At Malin Head" — Crashing Waves At Malin Head, Inishowen, Donegal – Emma Cownie

Lookout on Malin Head

On the most northerly tip of the island of Ireland, you will find a tower that was built in 1805 during the Napoleonic wars as a lookout tower to defend against any attacks by the French. You can see at the top left hand side of my painting above. Edges of places are places to look out from – for invaders, or for incoming storms. Weather reports that were important to local and international shipping were first recorded at Malin Head in 1870. It was in that year the tower became a signal tower for Lloyds of London. Semaphore was used to connect with ships at sea and the lighthouse on nearby Inishtrahull. In 1902 the first commercial wireless message was sent from Malin Head to the S.S.Lake Ontario by the Marconi Company.

Divers’ magnet

There are the wrecks of many ships lying off the coast in this area. Many of these such as SS Audacious, SS Carthaginian and RMS Justicia date to the time of the First World War, when Ireland was still part of the British Empire.

In 1917 two German mines sank Laurentic and although her crew successfully abandoned ship, but 354 of them died of hypothermia in her lifeboats.Interestingly, Laurentic was carrying about 43 tons of gold bars when she sank. Most of the 3,211 bars were salvaged by 1924; three more bars were found in the 1930s, however 22 gold bars have still not been recovered.

The Great Emergency/Second World War

During the Second World War, Ireland was neutral. The Irish army built lookout posts in places along the coast to prevent any violation of this neutrality. This was important as this part of Donegal is so close to Northern Ireland, which not not neutral and was bombed by the Germans. There is an EIRE 80 sign built of stones during the war so aircraft would know that they were over Ireland (not Northern Ireland). They acted also as a navigational aid for pilots. Eire 79 is at Fanad Head to the west. Eire 81 is at Glengad Head, further along the Inishowen Peninsula, to the east. You can see it on the map below. The SS Athenia, a passenger ship carrying 1,418 people was torpedoed by a German U-boat just hours after war had been declared in 1939 off the coast of Malin Head! Most of the passengers survived but 117 perished.

Some scenes from the film Star Wars: The Last Jedi film was shot at Malin Head. I have to admit that I am not a Star Wars fan – I never made it through awhole film. I have to admit that I’m more of a Star Trek fan. Apparently, it is possible to have a tour of the locations used for the film from local tour guides. The road leading up to Bamba’s Crown has been renamed locally from the R242 to the R2D2 in recognition of the Star Wars connection. Also beside the tower, there is a short lovely refreshing walk along the cliffs to Hell’s Hole. The cliffs are massive here and even on a relatively calm day the sea is restless and a bit intimidating It needs to be remembered that this not just a sea here but an Ocean.

Birds Eye View of Malin Head, Donegal- Emma Cownie

See Inishowen Paintings

See Donegal Prints

https://www.inishview.com/activity/the-tower

https://www.authenticvacations.com/star-wars-filming-locations-ireland

https://www.odohertyheritage.org/maps

“I was so tired I started whimpering!” Sophie Power on running the length of Ireland

Posted on April 24, 2022May 29, 2024 by emma cownie — 29 Comments

Adventures in Acrylic Paint

You probably think that artists are good at creating paintings/images in all mediums; oil, watercolours acrylic paints. Many probably are, but I am not. I need to work at it. It’s a bit like being an athlete. You might be great at football but it doesn’t automatically mean you are a great sprinter, tennis player or swimer. Although there are athletes who have successfully switched disciplines, like Usain Bolt, who started his career as a footballer; extra training is needed. I think painting is like that.

Almost all of my experience up to now has been in working with oil paints but in the last six months I have been working hard at painting in acrylics. Why? I knew that in our small house in Derry, until we got stairs put into the attic space, that oil paints and with their associated mess and fumes weren’t going to work.

Unfortunately I feel like I have been hitting my head against a brick wall for several months. I have learnt a great deal, using acrylic mediums and varnishes is very technical, but I won’t go into all the detail of what I have learnt. The strange thing is that the finished paintings looked good but the process of creating them was slow and frustrating. Here are some early examples;

Painting of fram buildings in Donegal — Shadow on the Entrance, Bloody Foreland

House in Inishbofin — House on Inishbofin

Painting of the view above Magheraroarty_Emma Cownie — Above Magheraroarty_Emma Cownie

This last one is my favourite but it took weeks to complete rather than days. I just don’t have the patience to spend that long on one smallish painting.

I also used acrylic paint for underpaintings for my oil painting, which worked better for me. It enabled be to paint faster, but this approach would be no good in Derry where I couldn’t use oil paints.

Boat at the Pier, Gola_Emma Cownie — Boat at the Pier, Gola (Donegal)

So why was I taking so long to complete these acrylic paintings? Acrylics don’t act like oil paints, that can be a good thing as well as a bad thing. You can correct mistakes easily. Acrylic paint is a relatively recent invention of the 1950s. It’s essentially a plastic. It is amazingly versatile but it’s origins as a polymer presents a couple of challenges that I have struggled with for some time. The first issue is that it dries fast. Really fast. I found that it dried on my palette within minutes. I hate wasting paint, so I made my own wet palette, so that the paint on my palette dries within days and not minutes.

It still dried very fast on the board/canvas on which I was painting. That meant that large areas, such as skies, werevery difficult to paint without looking patchy. I learnt to mix up large quantities of paint so that if I needed to, I could repaint a small area of the sky. Otherwise, the whole sky had to be repainted.

The second big issue I had was somehing called “colour shift”. Acrylic paint dries dark. This is because most makers of acrylic paint use white binder that dries clear, so it looks light when you apply it, but goes dark as it dries. It seems to affect blues and browns particularly badly. I tried painting patches of colour to see who was the worst offender.

Although Windsor & Newton’s paints use clear blinder and have little colour shift, I didn’t particularly like them as a paint. I am not sure why I didn’t like them, possibly I just prefered to colour range of other manufacturers. Anyway, in the end I bought lots of Schminke PrimAcryl paints which also use a clear binder and results in only a small colour shift.

Finally, I decided to experiment with indirect painting. This is a method where by an underpainting in grayscale is done first and light layers of colour are applied as a glazes.

Again, its’s not as speedy as painting in oils (although I have used brown-tonal underpaintings in the past – with oil paintings, see here).

So here are two paintings I painted tonal underpaintings, and then added colour through a series of glazes.

Greyscale study of lambing Season at Fanad Head

Work in Progress - Lambing season at Fanad Head — Work in Progress – Lambing season at Fanad Head

Lambing season at Fanad Head (Donegal) – Final version

Greyscale study of Fanad Lighthouse – painted on a blue ground, which I left in the sky area of the painting.

Almost done – Fanad Lighthouse (Donegal)

Lighthouse at Fanad Head (Donegal) – Final version with lightened sky

This approach seemed to work well for acrylics. Although I am still not as quick as I am in oils, this process enables me to produce paintings with greater depth of colour and more accurate tonal values. It is especially good for getting distant mountains right, something I have struggled with in the past. I am hoping that I have finally got the hang of working with this medium. I think it’s the end of the beginning rather than the beginning of the end. There’s always so much to learn with painting no matter which medium you use!

Some of my resources

Indirect painting and Glazing https://thevirtualinstructor.com/how-to-glaze-acrylics.html

Willaim Kemp’s Art School https://willkempartschool.com/acrylic-tonal-study-using-colour-strings-glazes/

UK stockist of PrimAcryl https://www.jacksonsart.com/schmincke-primacryl-acrylic