Category: Inspirations

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Worm’s Head Lookout Station at Rhossili, Gower

Worm Head Coastwatch station
Painting Worms Head Station, Rhossili
Worms Head Coastwatch Station (SOLD)

This is another gem in the Gower landscape – the Worm’s Head Lookout Station at Rhossili.  I really enjoyed painting this. This stout and sturdy single story building is made of granite and was built over 120 years ago, around 1896. It sits alone at the top of the high cliffs that look out towards Worms Head and beyond to Lundy Island and to the Celtic Sea. The wind-blasted building has an 8m flagstaff and a 6m wind generator.  I was inspired to paint this because of the sharp summer shadows and the isolation of the tiny building. It oozes Hopper.

It is set in a very beautiful but dangerous coastline. Between the cliffs and Worm Head is the Causeway, a scramble of rocks and rock pools, which is open for 2.5 hours either side of low tide. The tidal rise here is the second highest in the world. However, it is fatal to attempt to wade or swim to when the causeway is flooded or partially so. The coastline and waters around Gower are lovely to look at and to paint but they need to be treated with great respect. The waters around the Worm can also be dangerous to small craft, fishing boats and surfers.

This is why I am very glad that a team of local volunteers for National Coastwatch look after the interests of visitors and seafarers, alike. Since 2007, from 10am till 4pm in the winter and 10am till 6pm in the summer the lookout is staffed. If at the end of watch the Causeway has not yet flooded and there are members of the public still out on Worm’s Head, the watch is kept open until everyone is safely back on the mainland. So although the Lookout Station looks somewhat bleak and empty, the front door is, in fact, open and there is someone inside looking out for us all!

For more information on National Coastwatch see https://www.nci.org.uk/wormshead

For an excellent online map of Gower see: http://www.mapsta.net/uk-os/gower/

Emma Cownie Art©

 

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Passive Smoking

Oil painting of people in Swansea town centre
Passive Smoking

This, like a number of my recent and forthcoming works, will not be available to buy for the foreseeable future as they will be exhibited first but I am posting details of them to keep collectors and artlovers up to date with my recent work, inspirations, and directions.

This painting is a new painting is heavily influenced by North American artists in its colouring and in its subject matter, namely the frisson that comes from human interaction, in the most apparently mundane settings.
I loved this scene, as the man seems ill at ease and not sure whether to leave or remain. He may even feel guilty that he is kinda in ear shot of the couple’s conversation and may appear to be eavesdropping. He was there first and then the couple joined him, to eagerly gossip and have a quick cigarette break. They seem so comfortable in each other’s company compared to the man who seems very ill at ease, aggrieved at having to endure their smoking and the drifting grey-white fumes.

Buy here

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Cross Town Traffic

New York Painting by Emma Cownie

This is the second in a series of urbanscapes in which I paint cities other than my home city of Swansea. Here we start with the first painting of a busy street in New York There will be urban cityscapes to follow of London and more of New York, among others. I love the brash, invigorating colours of New York streets, how they demand to be seen, noticed and paid attention to. The fluorescent and neon sign lights from banks of advertisements blend with a river of colour, awash in the rain soaked streets below. I love how the orange yellow taxi wheels spin up grey-green spray as they tear up the streets. How the garish orange-pinks compliment the deep greens, bible blacks and devil reds on the wet roads.

All the colours seem visually orchestrated by the elements and the street bustle in a chromatic symphony. Chaotic but in continual synchronicity.

Contemporary oil painting of New York Traffic
Cross Town Traffic (SOLD)

 

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The Shadows We Cast

Shadows we Cast

 

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Shadows we Cast (SOLD)

A new oil painting “The Shadows We Cast” this oil painting is inspired by watching three people waiting, on a brilliant sunny day, on the High Street for their loved ones inside the shop.

“Although the old man who was waiting for his wife and daughter, he is not with the man who is protectively looking on as his son plays with the shadow cast on the pavement. They both wait for their wife and mum.
However, they all seemed connected, and this is heightened by them by being male and in the act of waiting.

I was going to call the painting “The Three Ages…” (of man) as we can see Bampi (grandfather), father and son but then thought the “Shadows We Cast” more lyrical as it not only describes literally the shadows cast, by the sun on the hard street and equally by the old man and boy, both “playing” in the contrasting darkness as they wait, which is in contrast to Dad’s watchful eye but also lyrically the protective loving effect others have on other lives and they have on other’s lives.

The casting shadows are their consideration of others and their consideration of them.

The old man is connected to the the two others in that he is waiting for the legacy he has in this wife and daughter and the man look on at his legacy in his son, a sense of now and the future in his facial expression, a wondering of the shadow he is casting in his son.

The father is a great juxtaposition here as he is seriously intent and firmly in the present reality of the moment whereas the son is in a fantastical revere of play and the oldman deep in the imaginary of a fondly remembered past.

The past can also cast a shadow on this sunny moment just as the child’s playful musing?

Only the father is resolutely here in the sunny present, perhaps allowing the other two their play?
Perhaps that is the shadow we cast, the protection that allows others to be happy and secure in their play, in themselves?”

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Canisland Woods – a Gower painting

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SOLD

This is the last of the summer wine of a substantial series of oil paintings of a woodland area in Gower Pensinsula between Ilston and Parkmill, which the locals call Cannisland Woods.

It is amazingly beautiful at any time of the year but the light is rarely better than in Winter when it is glassy clear and this helps create a riot of colours and hues in this most dank time, in the mulched leave-layered ground, in the trickling everchanging brook of the Killy Willy, in the distant haze behind the barren trees and in the wonderfully green-mossy trees and shiney, slippery brown barks of the twisted trees by the Killy Willy.

This is another “refractionist” (expressionist) style painting which is similar to Sapling Wood and Rainbow Wood in it’s sweeping streaks of colour but much more grand in it’s ambition and luxuriant in its detail. This will probably be the last of this series of paintings for some time so enjoy.

The painting has sold but you can buy a large limited edition mounted print here

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The Cloud Remains

“This painting is of the straggling wisps of cloud left on the hills in the Black Mountains after a passing storm. It was an amazing scene, this steam-like vapour rising out of the backs and humps of the hills. It looked as if the hills had just had a shower and the appearing sun was drying them off. I loved how the low lying clouds combed the trees and hedges as they floated past. The sun, shining through to illuminate this effect, seemed also to grow patchworks of colours from the fields around the surrounding landscape, as it the light was a nurturing spectral beam. The colours in the Black Mountains after the weather breaks on the hills are heavenly and this is what I hoped to convey. ”

the cloud remains005
The Cloud Remains (SOLD)
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Enchanted Wood

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Enchanted Wood (SOLD)

 

This is a painting of a most enchanted wood, halfway between Ilston and the Gower Inn in the Parkmill area of Gower peninsula in Wales. These woody areas, as many artlovers will have realised by now, are a constant source of inspiration for much of my refractionist and post-refractionist work. This pine wood lies on one side of a bridge with ancient woodland on the other, the contrast between the knarled, mossy twisted ancient branches of the ancient wood across the bridge in clear contrast to the straight, textured, orderly pine trees this side of the bridge. In fact, crossing this bridge gives one a heightened sense of having moved from one region or realm to another, adds to the feeling of having been transported somewhere different.

 

This is the inspiration for this painting, this feeling as we view the clear late October light falling across this woodland path. I tried to catch the fact that the path is covered in layers of pine needles, mulched to make the most soft and slightly bouncy carpet of needles. It is these needles, layers heaped and heaped on each other that softens the light and gives it texture, catches the light in its soft grasp, making it almost fluffy. The carpet of pine needles fall to create a complete deadening of noise in this wood which is quite a beautiful affect, this complete silence. This adds to the wood’s sense of enchantment. The silence makes this almost a world apart, a secret quiet place to escape to and roam and explore and enjoy as a child. It is a great escape to somewhere unusual and oddly mystical. Enchanted even…

The painting has sold but you can buy a large limited edition mounted print here

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Grey Clouds over Black Mountain – a Brecon Beacons painting

Brecon Becons Painting
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Grey Clouds Over Black Mountain (Oil on Linen Canvas 100×80 cm) 

This oil painting is of an area that inspires many of my landscapes, the Brecon Beacons in Mid Wales.
Unlike most of my other landscape paintings of the Beacons which paint areas of the Black Mountains, this painting is on the opposite side of the central Brecon Beacons from the Black Mountains, in an area called, somewhat confusingly, the Black Mountain.

The Black Mountains are more rural and more farmland dotted whereas parts of the Black Mountain are quite desolate and coarse in their moorland bleakness. One area seems generally more cultivated compared to the wildness of the other. This is why I love both in different ways. I love the Carmarthen Fan as this is more wild and unkempt although this soon gives way to the farm lands and patchworked fields like the other side of the central Beacons, as the earthy colours of agricultural Carmarthenshire also slide down the sides of these great glaciated monuments and into the the dim distance as they do on the other side too.

I love to convey some of this “giving way” to this naturally quilted farm land from these hard glaciated rocks of the Black Mountain in this painting. From the sandy fair illusion of softness in the far heights to the lush fruity colours in the near distance. I have also attempted to show the wondrous movement of clouds one experiences throughout the Brecon Beacons too, rolling their awesome way like herds of fluffy sky giants, tickling the tips of hills and caressing scarred ridges as they go. The movement of these ever-changing clouds over hills and mountains produces this amazing silverly grey light that when illuminated by the peeping, fleeting sun makes everything more more clear and the depth of perception much deeper.

It appears to hold everything in is wrapped clear focus. Almost magnifies the clarity of our onlooking vision. This makes the foreground colours deepen and seem more rich. It is a particular feature of upland Welsh areas, this brilliant luminescent light. Always changing and bestowing it’s chromatic good fortune on whatever it traverses.

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Fresh October Morning

 

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Fresh October Morning (SOLD)

This oil painting returns to Gower for inspiration. The area painted is further upstream from the earlier “Ilston” series”. I wanted to paint more of an expanse behind the trees and brook to give a heightened expression of that fresh, crisp, nose tingling feeling of early morning in late October.

 

The background morphed into burnished orangy-purple hills, perhaps unconsciously inspired by the rustic settings and autumnal colouring of the “Group of Seven” paintings and Tom Thomson in particular. I want the viewer to gasp, full lunged, the fresh air when viewing this painting.

Buy large limited edition woodland prints here 

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Windswept Inspiration

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Every weekend my husband and I explore and almost mine the beauty of Gower peninsula with its amazing variety of beaches, woods, hills and valleys for inspiration for my next paintings. Increasingly I have used this peninsula to keep my artistic juices flowing. It is almost as if we are harvesting the beauty of Gower in some way and using it to create art before sharing this bounty with art lovers throughout the world.

Different paintings of Gower adorn walls in the homes of art lovers on various continents. Our weekend walks are not just for our aesthetic enrichment but for others too it would seem. What a joy to share the beauty of this stunning peninsula designated Britain’s first Area of Outstanding Beauty.