'You never know what will happen when you paint outside'

Painting in oils on blustery Cornish cliffs, during a year of ferocious storms, was certainly a challenge for one of Britain’s most talented up-and-coming artists. “Because of the horrendous weather, I had to invent totally new ways of working,” says Emily Faludy, 37, who was born in Portsmouth.

The award-winning young artist made five immersive painting trips to Cornwall’s South West Coastal Path, in a year of unusually atrocious weather, for a new exhibition that showcases her expressionist brushwork.

Her challenge was to capture monumental views, dramatic skies and boats in choppy harbour waters at sites between Fowey and Tintagel – and to suffuse the “energy of the elements” into her art. And she painted in diabolic, sometimes treacherous, conditions.

“I just had to turn up and get on with it. This worked to my advantage as I was painting in conditions I wouldn’t normally consider working in, so the paintings are very different than if I had cherry-picked the days,” says Emily. “Uncomfortable weather produces the best painting. It’s primal, like wrestling a beast; with big, foamy waves crashing against the cliffs.”

In fact, the weather this spring around Penzance was so severe, she nearly lost a canvas to the elements when it blew onto the rocks below. “I decided to lash the next one to railings, using bungee cords from a camping store,” she laughs.

Emily, who has a first-class degree in Fine Art from University of Wales, Aberystwyth, exhibited her evocative landscapes at Tregony Contemporary gallery earlier this month. She’s part of the joint show, The Painted Path, alongside painter Lawrie Quigley, who is just as determined as Emily to immerse his artistic process in the weather.

This particular method lends all the pieces a “compelling energy”, says art consultant Annie Friedlein, who wrote the introduction to The Painted Path exhibition.

Emily sometimes applied paint with a grouting spatula from B&Q; it became one of her favourite bits of equipment.

“If you get cold hands or feet, it’s game over,” she explains. “I had USB-rechargeable insoles for my shoes, hand-warmers, gloves and six layers of clothing.” Far from the image of an artist in a smock or apron, Emily cut a determined modern figure on painting trips, looking more Arctic explorer than artist – her activities revealed only by the smears of oil paint daubed on her Gore-Tex outer-layer, from wiping brushes on her clothing.

“One frequent comment I got from passersby is, ‘You’re supposed to put the paint on the canvas, love’. One challenge was finding ways to apply paint to canvas so it didn’t slide off while being pelted by raindrops. But the greatest challenge was the wind, which had a tendency to turn my canvas into a sail, so I painted the really big ones not too far from a car park. You can’t be carrying what is essentially a giant kite around windy cliff paths.”

She resorted to using cords after an alarming misadventure she only escaped from via the leg of a passing dog walker.

“I was at Trebarwith Strand, a beautiful area in North Cornwall near Tintagel, and found a spot down by these huge lumps of dark rocks, by a set of bins on a concrete ledge,” she continues. “Feeling quite pleased with myself, I started working, but suddenly the wind picked up out of nowhere and swept the canvas – doing its sail thing – together with the easel, to which it was strapped, down onto the rocks.”

Determined to rescue her materials, Emily jumped off the concrete ledge onto what turned out to be very slippery rocks. “It wasn’t too bad posting the equipment back up onto the ledge, but then I realised I couldn’t get back up myself. I thought ‘my mum is going to be so angry if I die this way, having saved the painting and not myself’.’”

Fortunately, 20 minutes later, as she was contemplating her fate, a dog walker came along. “She held on to the railing and I had to climb up her leg. I literally had to crawl up her. It was very undignified.”

On another occasion, painting a large work in a steady wind above Mullion Cove, Emily became aware of a gathering of people nearby. “I could hear little bits of what was clearly a eulogy,” she explains.

“And then I thought, ‘It’s getting a bit dusty here’. I looked back to see 20 horrified people, one of whom was shaking a bag full of what was clearly someone’s ashes.

“Things happen when you paint outside,” she laughs. “It’s very different from being in a studio.”

She even painted St Michael’s Mount from her car, with the windscreen wipers on. “A messy endeavour,” she admits. Like the 20th-century painters she most admires – David Bomberg and Frank Auerbach included – Emily paints en plein air, a French expression meaning “in the open air”.

It refers to the act of painting outdoors, exposed to the elements, in order to better capture elemental power and natural light.

“It’s like painting in four dimensions, really, because unlike working from a static, two-dimensional photograph, you also have the dimension of time,” she says of the changing light, tides and weather.

The results are powerfully affecting. Experiencing an Emily Faludy landscape is all about immersion. Her bathe-worthy works have the power to transport the viewer into the heft and depth of a monumental clifftop scene, or onto a beach where expressionist brush strokes are suggestive of figures and their windswept, determined doings, grappling with all the paraphernalia required for a day at the English seaside.

Leading British artist Maggi Hambling CBE was so impressed with her technique that in 2021 she chose Emily’s painting Heaving Beach as her winner at the plein air painting event, Paint Out Norfolk. Says Emily: “The beach on the Norfolk coast was completely full on that absolutely boiling day in July, and I was trying to capture the chaotic, jumbled atmosphere.”

Hambling said her judging was incredibly quick that day: “Out of that little painting came all the heat of that day, all the confusion, all the chaos. And it also looks like it was painted ‘just like that’.

“It wasn’t a sort of Duke of Edinburgh Award for diligence in this painting, it was done ‘just like that’ and the paint is mad, and the feeling of heat and that compression of people.”

The artist’s parents were both English teachers. Her paternal grandfather was the Hungarian poet laureate George Faludy. Emily’s severely dyslexic brother Alexander, 40, was the youngest person to go up to Cambridge for a degree, aged 15, since William Pitt the Younger in 1773.

Emily’s own determination to forge a bond with the landscape is reminiscent of 18th-century visionary JMW Turner. In 1842, the painter – now arguably Britain’s greatest ever artist – was tied to a ship’s mast for four hours in the midst of a storm to better capture the chaotic blur of elemental forces around him. Snow Storm – Steam Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth is one of his finest achievements and gave birth to a great new movement: abstraction.

For Emily, painting outside is the connection that creates the “inner content” of the work. “Building an intimate relationship with the outer world brings the paintings alive,” she says. “Oils provide a responsive and sensuous vehicle to convey emotions.

“The experience of making the work becomes embedded in the paint, resulting in energised images which speak to the viewer on a visceral level.”

Emily declares that she is at her happiest embarking on painting trips, exploring wild parts of the UK and beyond, and her next stop will be sunflowers on the south coast.

Watch this space for her monumental florals.

* The catalogue of Painted Path, with works by Emily Faludy and Lawrie Quigley, is available see at tregonycontemporary.com/artists/the-painted-path