Just arrived back from a wonderfully relaxing holiday in the Black Mountains – a week of walking, climbing up hills and mountains, taking photographs, painting en plein air and painting sketching for later art work. Great to get away from it all if only to come back refreshed and loaded up with inspiration for future artwork. The Black Mountains is a major inspiration, alongside the Gower Peninsula, in my art work. I love the clear mountain light, the shadows it creates, casting its long dark fingers across rounded hills, through tree and hedgerows and deep into the ragged craggy furrows of the numerous glaciated mountain faces strewn throughout this area of the Brecon Beacons.
Delighted to say I have just SOLD “Ilston Brook” directly via my Art Gallery, the “Back Lane Gallery” here in Brynmill Swansea (the lane is the opposite the Rhyddings Pub.)
This oil painting was SOLD to a lovely art collector who visited from Cardiff and had a private viewing before buying this lovely oil painting! I hope to sell more paintings directly via my The Back Lane Gallery in the coming months and years.
“A “refractionist” interpretive oil painting of a brook running through a wood near Ilston in the Gower Peninsula. The winter light combines with the grey haze of barren branched trees to create subtle, almost misty, pinks and purples, softened by the reflective silvery water.”
A new oil painting – “Weighing it Up” – down Cardiff market. This Hopperesque painting is of the fish market at the Hayes entrance to Cardiff Market. I have always loved the glaring artificial light above this fish stall. It creates some lovely colours and a pleasing depth of field. The fishmonger weighs his goods while the customer deliberates on what to have next, hence the tile “Weighing it Up”
Delighted to say I have just SOLD this my last Giclee print to be sold via Artfinder
“Cric in the Snow”, my most popular Giclee print of all time!
“I love painting snow, whether brillant midday sun, blue-tinged, snow or pinky sunset snow. I love how blues and pinks hover above the snowy white. I love the snow’s power to transform, to turn a plain town into a lovely town, and a lovely town in something quite majestic.
You can still buy this as a print from my shop on Artmajeur.com here
Cric in the Snow
In “Crick in the Snow, the lovely village of Crickhowell is transformed into a picture-postcard beauty by the snow and the dramatic background of the snow glistering hills. I live by the sea where the salty sea erodes most heavy snow drifts. Thus I have to travel inland to the Welsh Valleys and beyond to find my snow laden landscapes.
In this painting I love the intricacy of the hedge rows climbing up the hills, the lacy threads of winter hedges, the patterns and the line and shapes. It has a “brueghelian” Christmas feel. All that is missing is the sleighing children, and swirling skates. I love the warm colours of the houses in the foreground contrasting with the cold blues in the distance countryside. The habitable back-lit with the inhabitable.
This heightens the feeling of Christmas, all wrapped up in each other’s shops and homes, and lives; reassuringly, comfortably, necessarily away from the icy outside, the outer reaches, around this human fire of company. This is a painting of a winter community as well as winter community more generally.”
Delighted to say I have just SOLD this oil painting “Before the Rush” via Artfinder
“This is an oil painting of the interior of the eatery “PIES” on St Mary Street Cardiff, in a lull period before the anticipated rush of customers to come. I was drawn into this eatery by the scores of light bulbs hanging from the ceiling which made it very light and attractive and luring from outside the shop. Hence I ventured in…”
This is another new oil painting “Rainbow Sugar Loaf”
An oil painting of Sugar Loaf Mountain near Abergavenny in Mid Wales, with rainbow colours of gorse, heather and burnt grass sun streaking across the hillside.
An oil painting/people portrait of a man finishing off his pasty while having a hard earned rest from scouring the stalls and bargain buying down Singleton Market, Swansea. “Pasty Alfresco” 24 x 30 cm.
New oil painting – “Uplands from Swansea Beach” – 60 x 50 cm – £295
“The title of this painting has a double meaning as Uplands also refers to the area of Swansea in the background of this painting as well as being upland from the beach, up the snaking road from Bryn y Mor. I loved painting the variety of colours in this painting, all the sudden spring colours of April. The lime and blue greens, purples and burgundies of newly sprouting leaves on various types of trees, the light pinks and oranges of fragile, floating cherry blossoms. Swansea is a leafy city and trees sprawl across the many sea facing hills of Swansea. I tried to contrast this light, fragile, often transient colouring with the that of the more concentrated, weighty, more permanent huddled terracotta houses and in turn with the sandy changeability of the sandy beach and wispy blue and white of the sea. “
Unmounted prints of this painting are available here
Delighted to say I have SOLD “Tide’s In, Mumbles” via facebook – a reminder that my artwork can be bought direct here on facebook or on twitter as well as on my website http://emmacownie.artweb.com/
