It’s all about the light
Gloucestershire artist Emeline Watchorn’s oil paintings capture little moments of magic, a vase of flowers on the windowsill, light falling on fruit and the birds that visit her village. BEE BAILEY finds out more
AT any given time of day, in any given season, Emeline Watchorn knows where the light in her house is likely to be best.
As an artist painting still life compositions, Emeline can often be found often wandering around the house in Withington with a single rose in a ceramic jug, a glass bowl full of pears or a few snowdrops in a vase. She is looking for the daylight that will elevate her oil paintings, the moodier light in the hallway where her work is often propped up against the wall to dry, the overhead light from the skylight in the kitchen or the light that comes in from the side in her studio.
“There’s something about the way light hits something that makes it magical and beautiful,” she says. “I’m fascinated by light going through glass, and the way you get a little spot of sparkle in the corner. I can look at it for hours and find it spellbinding. That’s what I’m trying to create in a painting.
“My work is very simple, there’s not much in each painting because the thing to me which is the hero is this relationship with light and the object.”
Emeline spent much of her career as an interior stylist, working for Homes & Gardens magazine and for brands including M&S and John Lewis. It’s that eye for two-dimensional styling that she needed for magazines and catalogue pictures that makes her work particularly pleasing.
When she was at school, Emeline took her art A level early because her teachers knew she was good at it but wanted her to concentrate on academic qualifications. It wasn’t considered to be an important subject, she says.
She went on to study art history at university but never had formal training as an artist. With the exception of life drawing classes, and an art group she attended in her 30s where she learned how to mix any colour using just white and three primary colours, her skill has all been self-taught and nurtured through hours and hours of practice.
In 2009, when she was pregnant with the youngest of her two daughters, Emeline left London for the Gloucestershire countryside. She started making ceramics, and picked up a paintbrush again, “doing still lifes, observing”.
By the time her youngest was in nursery, Emeline was regularly selling her work. With discipline, she has turned her creative passion into a successful livelihood that she loves.
There is a solid structure to her week, spending a great deal of time arranging and photographing everything she wants to paint, then sitting down to work; putting her pictures online on a Friday, then spending Monday packaging and posting the pieces that have sold over the weekend before starting the cycle again.
“Creativity is a job for me as well as a passion.
I got out there and met people and sold. I made it commercially viable very quickly and didn’t see it as a hobby or indulgence,” she says.
“You have to have a lot of passion for it and really love it, which I do, and look forward to it, pore over it and obsess over it.”
There are, she says, several points that have helped her artistic career grow. One was the first UK lockdown. With her girls home schooling and life on pause, she found her diary and her mind were clearer.
“I had nothing else to do. I wasn’t on the road, dropping off children and doing other things. The children settled into their home schooling and I just painted and painted,” she says.
“I can take positives out of most situations and I saw positives creatively out of lockdown. It doesn’t take much for me to lose my flow in the week but in lockdown I never lost that flow because of the removal of all the extra stuff in my brain. There were no interruptions. I couldn’t go anywhere. All of those things that are normal life were removed.
Maybe lockdown gave us time to look a little more. Seeing, listening and pausing is very good for your soul. That’s part of the whole process for me Emeline Watchorn
“I was happily locked into this creative mode in a way that was rather lovely and extraordinary.”
Composing a beautiful scene that she wants to paint takes a big chunk of time in the process.
It is Emeline’s instinct for knowing what looks good, honed over years of interiors styling, that has helped enormously when she’s creating an arrangement of flowers or fruit to paint.
“The hard bit is deciding what to paint, how to paint it and where it’s going to be set up. It takes a lot of effort,” she says.
“I photograph and then paint from photographs because the light changes. Taking the photograph of the still life will often take longer than painting it because so much effort goes into getting it just right.
“I can spend a whole day wandering around the house with jars of flowers, taking hundreds of photos until I get it just right – then I’ll paint it.
“The fiddling about side takes longer than the painting side. Once I’ve made all those decisions and sat down to paint, I usually produce around four or five in a week if I’m really in the zone.
“It’s not whimsical, it’s my job. I get huge amounts of pleasure from it but I am a working artist and I’m quite self-disciplined.”
Emeline enjoys painting the birds that visit her garden and the village – long-tailed tits, blackbirds and wrens – and simple compositions that show the beauty of one thing; shiny red apples on the kitchen counter, pink hellebores against a dove grey vase, blossom on the windowsill.
She has a cupboard full of jugs and pots and jars to put them in; all the ceramics that she loved making when she first left London.
“My work is very simple because I find happiness and joy and peace through very little on a canvas. I can’t do those big, complicated compositions; I see more beauty in less.
“It’s almost condensed to one little snowdrop that’s achingly beautiful with the way the light has hit it and cast a shadow. Good composition is different for everyone but for me it’s balanced shapes and objects that will suddenly look right. The more you do it, the easier it gets.
“Arrangement of objects means something to me, but the way that the light hits the object – whether it be a vase or a flower – to me is what I am trying to recreate because it makes the object completely come alive.”
Emeline will soon be moving to Cheltenham and, although she absolutely loves living in the country, she’s looking forward to exploring the different light in her new home and seeing how the change affects her work.
Until then she’s enjoying her surroundings, always keeping her eyes open as she’s walking the dog, waiting to see what gifts nature is offering up for her to paint.
“Being an artist, you are eyes to the world. You see stuff and you interpret it,” she says.
“I wander around the village with a pair of secateurs. I’ve just seen some magnolias that are about to come out and will knock on a neighbour’s door and say, ‘Do you mind?’. I am often spotted looking, and thinking, ‘Oh, that would be nice’.”
Emeline hopes that people will hold on to the ritual many developed during lockdown of having daily walks or sitting by the window watching the seasons changing and taking time to notice what was happening around them, the different plants and flowers they saw growing, the sound of birdsong, and being in nature without simply rushing through it on the way to whatever thing they had to do next, headphones playing music or phones pressed to one ear in conversation.
“Life had got very fast and distracting and very technological,” she says.
“Maybe lockdown gave us time to look a little more. Seeing, listening and pausing is very good for your soul. That’s part of the whole process for me. It’s a known tool to decode and to rest your brain.
“It’s mindfulness really, the ability to pause. I’ve never been able to meditate but I find that comes naturally if I just walk through the countryside. To stop and stand still and look at something and think of nothing but that thing is very meditative.”
Today she is painting plum blossom in her studio, a lightfilled triple aspect room in a quiet part of the house with rows of sunny daffodils growing right outside.
During lockdown, her daughters sometimes gravitated towards it to do their schoolwork and the three of them would work alongside each other.
“It’s a beautiful space,” Emeline says. “I had painted in kitchens and dining rooms and corners before but this was the first house where I had a proper studio. Sometimes everyone piled in here during lockdown. I loved it.
“I’ve been painting daffodils all week so it’s set up as a still life and then the window beyond is a bank of solid daffodils. I’m a useless gardener but the people who were here before were here for a long time and the garden’s very well planted.
“Every week throws up something new, snowdrops, those beautiful daffodils and hellebore. I just respond to my small environment.
“I’m not a horticulturalist, I barely know the names of anything, but I see a flower or a bird and think, ‘Gosh, that’s lovely’. It makes me happy so it will make someone else happy.”
■ Emeline Watchorn sells her paintings online at www.emelinewatchorn.com or call 07765 576117. Her work can also be seen on Instagram @emelinewatchorn. Limited edition prints start at £45. Framed originals start at £120.
■ Emeline is exhibiting at the Country Brocante’s autumn fair, on September 30 and October 1 at Daylesford Organic Farm, near Kingham, Gloucestershire. Tickets are available on the day, from www.thecountrybrocante.co.uk or by calling 01730 810973. There will be 150 exhibitors, including antiques, interiors and talks.