Fleur Cowgill Fine Artist
Welcome to my website,
You will find many examples of my paintings alongside comments, descriptions and information on my art practice.
I like working in my own studio – away from home life – my only truly personal space. I like large canvases responsive to should muscle gestural sweeps of brush or knife. I often work nose to canvas with small pieces of charcoal or pastel making loose grids on which to lay the paint.
I hope you will enjoy what you see and read – studio visits can also be arranged.
Featured Work
Over The Third
Play of light in Nature. Seasons. Thick layers of paint laid on with palette knives and scratched or scraped back to reveal bare earth – echoing growth and regrowth. Universal images of tamed land reclaimed by wilding evoking noise of elements and the invisible lives lived in woodland and hedgerow.
100 x 100cm Oil on canvas
Portals Greenwich Village NY. NY
Complex, energetic, crisscrossing the formal grid of New York streets and avenues. Glimpses of what was before, what may come, what might be found around a corner. Noise made visual. From the heights of High Line or the balconies of the Guggenheim to the churning waters of Hudson and East rivers.
Experimenting with collage inserts of previous paintings – stapled in bright, modern metal to glint through softer shades of green and purple paint. Energetic sweeping marking reflecting endless, restless.
100 x 100 cm Oil & collage on canvas
The Circadian Eternity of Maternity
Inspired by a Georgian Townhouse, Brunswick Square, Brighton, upstairs and downstairs. Generations of both the ‘family’ and their servants. The babies born, the mothers nursing through 24 hours. 24/7, year in, year out – mirrored by my own daughter becoming a mother. The eternal image of mother’s oval face and baby’s bullet head – exploded into birth and life. Divisions created to echo windows on time – layers of worn gold leaf representing gaudy jaunty Georgians, drab browns and muted greens for Victorians before vivid, energetic colours for the 20th century. The beach, the houses, the downs and the horses riding into the sky.
100 x 120cm Oil & pastel on canvas
The Standoff
My stocky cocker spaniel, one minute a blur of fur running ecstatic circles on an empty fairway. Suddenly stock still as a maelstrom of dried leaves catches her eye. The cold days of lockdown allow us endless freedom to roam the semi-tamed golf course.
100 x 100 cm Oil on canvas
Sun Stripes
Bars of light, lying like the ‘architectural’ slabs of low land form around Greece. Dazzling light shining through the air reflected in deep sea channels of white rock. Endless, relentless but welcome sunshine. Layers of paint represent the layers of civilisations, the enduring land – still, potent with myth and drama.
100 x 100 cm Oil on canvas