Tag: Brecon Beacons

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 Bannau Brycheiniog (the Brecon Beacons)

Table Mountain, Crickhowell by Emma Cownie

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.

Crick in the Snow
Crick in the Snow 2013

I have explored different approaches to this subject matter. I have used a design-style – where the colours are flat and very simplied.

Oil Painting of Brecon Beacons
The Distant Beacons 2015
Painting of Pen Y Fan
Autumn Beacons 2014

To a more less-stylish and realistic approach, with softer colours.

Beacons painting commission by Emma Cownie
Beacons painting commission by Emma Cownie

To a semi-realist approach with elements of stylished flat colours.

Brecon Beacons painting commission
Three peaks – Brecon Beacons painting commission

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.

Hazy Beacons - Emma Cownie
Hazy Beacons – Emma Cownie

Distant Sugar Loaf
Distant Sugar Loaf
Table Mountain, Crickhowell by Emma Cownie
Table Mountain, Crickhowell by Emma Cownie
Summer in Mid Wales
Summer in Mid Wales
Mid Wales
Mid Wales

Buy  Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) paintings here

Find out More

https://www.exploringmidwales.co.uk

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Autumn Beckoned – a Brecon Beacons painting

Delighted to say I have just SOLD “Autumn Beacons” via Artfinder – now off to live in Worcestershire!

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“Oil painting of mountains in the Brecon Beacons Bannau Brycheiniog , autumn-coloured purple by the weather-coarsed heather”.

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Farm under the Velvet Mountain – a Brecon Beacons Painting

Farm under Velvet Mountain501
Farm under Velvet Mountain (SOLD)

 

This is an oil painting of the Table Mountain in Mid Wales (Bannau Brycheiniog – Brecon Beacons). 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.

 

See available paintings of the area 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. ”

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The Cloud Remains (SOLD)

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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.

Buy here 

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Moving Mountains – a Brecon Beacons Painting

Delighted to say I have just SOLD “Sugar Loaf and Table Mountain”” via Artfinder – now off to live in Surrey!

https://www.artfinder.com/product/sugar-loaf-and-table-mountain/

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“Returning again to paint one of my favourite views and areas of Mid Wales, that of The Black Mountains in the Brecon Beacons National Park.
This is a scene of the fleeting sun light through the clouds, brushed by the evening’s sunsetting colours of pinky oranges, purply pinks, turquoise, steely blues and mauve, as we look at evening light as it catches the Sugar Loaf and Table Mountain in the distance.”

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“Cric in the Snow” is the most popular print on Artfinder.com

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.”

 

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Above Crickhowell, Wales

Delighted to say I have just SOLD this oil painting “Above Crickhowell” via Artfinder!

“A landscape of the hilly uplands outside and overlooking Crickhowell, Wales, UK, pink painted by the heather .”

It can also be bought as a print on Artmajeur.com here

 

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Sugar Loaf and Table Mountain – a Brecon Beacons painting

A new painting – “Sugar Loaf and Table Mountain” – oil, £285 – 60 x 50cm

“Returning again to paint one of my favourite views and areas of Mid Wales, that of The Black Mountains in the Brecon Beacons National Park.
This is a scene of the fleeting sun light through the clouds, brushed by the evening’s sunsetting colours of pinky oranges, purply pinks, turquoise, steely blues and mauve, as we look at evening light as it shades the Sugar Loaf and Table Mountain in the distance.”

 

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