Emma J Lock, Visual Artist/Painter

Renaissance and stepping into the unknown

Moving to Cumbria at eleven, Emma soon became immersed in the landscape and the famously wild and gnarly Lake District weather. Her love for great expanses of open spaces, wild coastlines, and being cocooned within the deep valleys was nurtured at an early age. As a dyslexic, she found herself organically honing her visual ability and knowledge. This developed alongside a deeply passionate adoration for both Impressionist and Renaissance art. For her eighth birthday she asked for a book on Renaissance art and immediately buried herself in it, marveling at the brilliance and glory of its worn illustrated pages.

Emma’s preferred working medium is artists’ acrylics with the addition of mediums to accentuate texture, sculptural form, and mark- making in work. She is also working in oils, multi-media collage, Japanese watercolor, charcoal, ink, pencil, and Unison pastels to name but a few.

Her artist process involves in situ photography, sketching and watercolour sketching but almost more importantly, feeling and experiencing the place, translating this into her work. She hopes to capture that feeling of the last warmth of the sun, as portrayed in, ‘In search of the dying sun’, “... the cutting, icy feeling of the squally wind lashing against your cheek as you cross the low tide,” Emma recalled. Often the greatest challenge is to take it all in, to do justice to the landscape. She often asks herself the same question: Can we ever do Nature’s masterpieces justice? For Emma painting must be an all-in event. It can be a long journey with some pieces taking years. As she develops her practice, she finds herself drawn to more obscure and abstract creation alongside her traditional landscape work, finding both fulfill differing parts of her compulsion to create.

She says painting can be a deeply cathartic and immersive experience at best. A whole soul journey from within. By far her most expressive creations have been when the music, emotion and environment have all been in perfect alignment. Music is a huge part of her work, the silent sister to the bigger production, providing the right frequency for the type of piece she is submerged in. Often finding the right genre can take hours, but it is as vital a component as the paint itself.

Emma’s more recent abstract pieces involved layering mediums, removing elements, and introducing imagery to enhance the feeling of the work’s message alongside more representational, symbolic structure. Emma says being an abstract artist is a completely different human experience from being a contemporary artist, almost kickstarting different areas of one’s consciousness.

Celebrating her 10-year anniversary as a professional artist in 2022, she has had the privilege of having numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Northern Lights Gallery in Keswick where she was showing for almost five years. Having made the move to Dumfries and Galloway, Emma is thrilled now to be represented by the Old Bakery Gallery in Newton Stewart and was delighted to join them in September 2022. www.emmajlock.co.uk https://www.instagram.com/ emmajlock.art/ emmajlock@live.co.uk https://www.facebook.com/

Work can also be viewed at Emma’s artist residence by private appointment only. Commissions are considered.