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Painting Cows

I am delighted to have sold “Koei 1509”, a painting of a South African cow, to a collector in Oxfordshire, England. The painting was based on a photograph by talented photographer Herman von Bon, who generously allowed me to use his image. Herman photographs the South African landscape along with its people and animals. I particular like his wildlife photography.

Oil painting of a Cow by Emma Cownie
Koei 1509

I like cows. I love all animals. I come from a family of animal lovers. I get pleasure from just looking at animals. I really enjoy painting them but I find it hard to part with my animal paintings.

Cows are the reason why I stopped eating meat a long time ago. When I was a post-graduate student at Cardiff University in the 1990s I spent a day cycling along the the flat marsh road that lies between Cardiff and Newport. It’s about 10 miles. On my way back, I stopped at a gate for a rest. I group of curious youngsters, Fresians, came up to gate to investigate me. They were cautious but seemed to egg each other on to come closer and stick out their noses to me. They amused me. I thought they were funny and sweet.

I stood for quite a while looking at them. Listening to them breathe. Cows have intelligent eyes. Big brown eyes. They weren’t essentially any different from the many animals my family had kept as pets over the years; cats, dogs and rabbits. Suddenly the thought came to me “I eat you and your friends”. I felt awful. Very guilty.

It felt very unnecessary.  I don’t need to eat meat. So I decided to stop. I’d been thinking about for for some time. People sometimes ask why I am a vegetarian and I could mention things such as the cruelty of factory farming, the environmental cost but I have never felt comfortable eating sentient creatures. I always felt a hypocrite for eating Sunday roast, no matter how tasty it was.

Oil painting of Hereford Cow by Emma Cownie
Hereford Red (Sold)

 

Many of my university friends were veggies but I didn’t like many vegetables (potatoes and peas was about it for many years) and I wasn’t sure what I would eat. To be honest, I was lazy. I had to learn to cook vegetarian meals. I started with a lot of pesto and pasta. A friend of mine recommended a Rose Elliot cook book and I painstakingly read the recipes (there were no photos in the book) and I eventually learnt a few recipes off by heart.  It was a bit of a slog but I felt much better for it, physically and mentally.

 

Although I don’t think that I paint cows all that often, they have added up over the years. I love Hereford cattle in particular. I was born in that English county and I love the russet red of their coats. You don’t see that many of them on Gower.

Colourful Painting of cow
Punk Cow (SOLD)

I seems to have painted Frisians the most – probably because I like the contrast of their black and white coats.

Oil painting of black and white cow in Gower landscape
Gower Cow (SOLD)

Gower Cow

I never paint “generic” cows. These are all real cows. All individuals. I found Gower Cow on the slopes of Cefn Bryn at the Penmaen end. She was chewing the cud with a small group of friends.

Painting of Cow at Pwll Du, Gower
Grazing at Pwll Du

The cow at Pwll Du was also with a group of friends, small herd I suppose, who came out of the undergrowth and started grazing on the grass by the stream at Pwll Du.

 

Writing this post got me thinking about the History of the cow in Art. There’s a lot to it so I have decided to save that for my next post.

 

Painting of black and white cow by Emma Cownie
On the Move

 

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Catching the Morning Light

When I get hold of an idea I can get quite obsessive about it. Lately, it’s been early morning light. I think it sprang from a post I wrote about transposing some of the techniques I used for my “Urban Minimal” project to what I only half-jokingly called “Rural Minimal”. I think that my rural Gower houses did fulfil the spirit of “Rural Minimal” but it got me think about shadows. Now, shadows were my first love. They still are. It’s hard to find any painting of mine without blue/mauve/purple/brown shadows. I go through tubes of Lukas 1862 Mauve at a steady rate. Many of my Gower woodland paintings used early morning winter light.

 

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Enchanted Wood  Limited edition mounted print (unframed) 

[wpecpp name=”Enchanted Wood Large Print ” price=”45″ align=”left”]

And why do I love shadows so much? It’s because they act as a foil to the light. The orange next to the dark mauve positively leaps off the canvas. Perhaps, its a cheap way of thrilling the viewer? I am always very impressed by artists who capture a gloomy or overcast landscape. Plein Air painters prefer overcast conditions because they are more constant and American artist, Jeremy Sams,  demonstrates this really well in his painting. He says “The good thing about painting on an overcast day is that you don’t have to chase shadows. The light remains very constant and my acrylic paints stay wet for a good long while.”

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Jeremy Sam’s Plein Air Study

However, I love shadows. They make a composition interesting and dynamic. So, anyway, the post about Rural Minimal got me thinking about shadows in rural settings. I realised that because I have been focusing on my Gower Walks and working to bus timetables that I was mostly walking in the late morning and finishing up in the early afternoon. I was becoming increasing frustrated that my lovely walks weren’t inspiring the sort of paintings I like to make. The light wasn’t right. Midday light, especially in the summer, has a tendency to bleach out the details. This is what shadows “do”, they show us the details of the landscape.

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Light Shadow

I have always been a morning person. Each morning is like a fresh start to me. What ever happened yesterday, last night is gone.To be honest, I think that have always done my best work by 11 am. When I was writing my PhD thesis, many years ago, I’d do my best writing between at 8 and 11 am. To be honest, most of the work I did after 11 am was fact checking (this was in the days before the interest when you had to look things up in books) and faffing, but I’d dutifully stay at my desk til 5 pm.

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Bernard Street Bus Stop (Back of Brynmill Launderette)  (Oil on Linen Canvas, 33 x 41 cm unframed)

[wpecpp name=”Bernard Street Bus Stop ” price=”250″ align=”left”]

 

So I decided that I need to seek out early morning light on Gower. This long spell of hot weather meant that morning skies were often (but not always) clear. That meant getting up early.  I have been dragging myself out of bed just after sunrise. It’s summer and the sun rises just after 5 am in here Wales. It is painful getting up that early but once I have had a cup of coffee I can face the outside world, just about.

The first time I drove down to Three Cliffs Bay, 6 miles away, I was so tired that I actually forgot my camera! I felt so stupid but I got back in my car and drove back home to fetch the darn thing, delaying my “start” by 30 minutes.

Pobbles Bay on Gower
Pobbles Bay after 8am

Compare the light and shadows to yesterday morning (when I remembered my camera) and actually got there for about 6.30am.

Pobbles Bay, Gower
Pobbles Bay 6.30 am

It’s different. Not necessarily better, just different. Do you know what, it doesn’t matter. I like both conditions.  The changing tides always also variety and interest. Summer Morning light has a beautiful rich quality to it and I like seeing how it changes, the shadows shorten, darken, light break over the cliffs, as the morning progresses. I have sat down on the cliff tops and watch the light change.

Early Morning, Three Cliffs
Early Morning, Three Cliffs  (Oil ob Linen canvas, 80×60 cm, unframed)

[wpecpp name=”Early Morning, Three Cliffs” price=”750″ align=”left”]

I like seeing nature first thing. I like seeing the dew. In this very dry summer it’s a godsend. The grass on rolling fairways of Pennard golf course has turned the colour of straw except for the patches where the dew collects in the morning. There it’s a fresh green. Walking down towards the sea, along the sandy path by the golf course, I often see the white tails of wild rabbits dashing into the undergrowth. Their numbers in the UK have fallen in recent decades but thankfully, there seem to be plenty on Gower.

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Welsh Wild Rabbit

Free-range cows roam the cliffs of Pennard and South Gate as well as the valley next to Three Cliffs Bay. They are usually busily eating the grass they can find down in the marshy valley or in the shadows of the thorny gorse bushes, or even in the Golf Club car park before the golfers arrive!

Cow in Car Park at Pennard
Cow at Pennard

 

Cows chewing the cud (mid morning) and cows at work, eating grass (early morning).

I delight in the long shadows and the reflections at low tide. How the reflected light is more golden than the light on the rocky cliffs.

 

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Three Cliffs Reflections  (SOLD Oil on Linen canvas , 80x50cm, unframed)

At high tide the colours all change again.

 

I have got up early and visited Rhossili, Penmaen and Three Cliffs Bay six times in the past fortnight. This includes the morning I thought the light cloud would clear but instead it thickened. A passing Jack Russell was photographed, as well as the rabbit above. So, I sat down and sketched.

 

I will keep going until this weather goes off, while may well be very soon. I will be working from this research for quite a while after it has clouded over again.

A while back, last June in fact, I read an excellent blog post by American artist Luann Udell entitled “How Long Did It Take You To Make That?” in which she discusses all time-consuming processes and skill that go into creating her pieces. It occurred to me that while the actual time it takes to paint my work may take anything from one to three days, depending on the size of the canvas, the actual thinking, planning, gestation, waiting for the weather and preparation takes a lot longer. I should also include in that waiting for the seasons to change. Just yesterday I was remarking to my husband that the heather was starting to flower and so another visit to Rhossili Downs would be in order soon. Nothing stays the same in nature, or in life! My job is to observe and attempt to capture some of those fleeting changes.

 

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Spring Coloured Woods – a Gower woodland

 

Delighted to say I have just SOLD “Spring Coloured Woods” via Artfinder.

Now off to live with “The Bridge to Parkmill” in Lancashire – will we see an Ilston Cwm triptych adorning a wall of a home in Lancashire?

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“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 i’ts detail.
This will probably be the last of this series of paintings for some time so enjoy.”

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Sprung Coloured Wood – a Gower painting

Painting of Welsh woods

Delighted to say I have just SOLD this oil painting “Spring Coloured Wood” one day after uploading onto my various online galleries! The artlover will be buying this lovely painting via my “Part Payment” scheme.

If you would like to spread the costs of paying for one of my paintings too please click on this link to find out more details of how to pay for my paintings over a period of months via part payment – the first payment secures the painting for you!

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Large limited edition mounted prints are available here 

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Farm under the Velvet Mountain – a Brecon Beacons Painting

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Farm under Velvet Mountain (SOLD)

This is an oil painting of the Table Mountain in Mid Wales. I painted this because I loved the colours of blues, turquoise and purple which blend pleasingly with the blue-greens and terracottas of the trees and land.

Nature unearths such lovely rich colours and casts them wide in lovely complementary chromatic patchworks.
I would say this painting is inspired like so many of my mid-Wales landscapes by one of my favourite painters, Robert Bevan, whose landscapes have influenced how I paint this type of hilly upland landscape as opposed to the landscape I paint of Gower Peninsula which is usually in my own unique refractionist style which in itself influenced by expressionism.

I love the idea that colour expresses emotion, transports and alleviates the self and a creates an emotional response to a place depicted in a painting. Ideally I like to transport the viewer to the place so that the viewer somehow feels they are there or have been there in some sense. That is somehow familiar to them. In this painting I hoped to transport one to soft lazy warmnesss of summer in the fields of Mid Wales. The velvety feel of the Table Mountain helps heighten this feeling of softness. The warm summer breeze can often give this sense of snoozy softness and I hope some of this is conveyed in this painting with the manicure trees like hairdryed Bouffants and the dusty dryness of the terracotta.

 

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Down by Killy Willy

Down By Killy Willy

“Down by Killy Willy” – A return to the scene of much of my recent inspirations for painting landscapes.
I just love how the light is caught and moulded around the tree trunks by the bright silver sunlight, bleaching out the barren, branched trees.
I love how the warm jacket of greeny moss blends and is balanced by the muddy browns under the water surface, visible through the dark shards of tree shadow falling on the still water.
It is so pleasingly rustic and complementary in it’s colours as sometimes nature only can be.
The name Killy Willy refers to name given ;locally for this brook or pill, by the local people around Ilston in the Gower Peninsuala, near Swansea, in South West Wales.

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Down by Killy Willy (SOLD)
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No Longer Still

Delighted to say I have just SOLD “The Still Killy Willy” via Artfinder !
https://www.artfinder.com/product/still-killy-willy/

“This is another oil painting of the stream in Ilston Cwm, in Gower. The stream painted here is sometimes known as the Killy Willy, which runs to sea as Pennard Pill, at Three Cliffs Bay.”

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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.