Capturing the beauty of nature with a paintbrush

Sandra Emslie’s house is a gallery of her work, with practically every patch of wall covered in paintings of the agricultural landscapes of Douneside and Migvie interspersed with scenes of her beautiful garden – Sandra’s other passion.

As she leads me through a terrace of colourful flowers through a large, well-tended lawn flanked by ancient trees, into an early 20th century greenhouse, she explains that her artistic career didn’t follow the most conventional route.

Sandra was an amateur artist for most of her life, working in watercolours, until one day, at the age of 46, she decided to give up her day job as a primary teacher to go to art school, where she studied full-time for four years. It was a brave endeavour, but it paid off.

Selling her first painting at her degree show, Sandra went on to be exhibited at the Wild Boar Café before being offered solo exhibitions at Gallery Heinzel in Aberdeen and Milton Gallery in Crathes.

When she was 60, she decided it was time to retire and focus on painting full time. ‘I just thought, “Right – I’ll get on with it”,’ she says.

Today she is working on a scene from her garden, depicting a newly-installed deer fence, which has an interesting netted pattern ‘you can play around with’. However, she is also careful not to fall into the trap of painting ‘cute’ pictures.

‘I don’t want it to end up being a pretty painting of flowers. I try to put in all the different colours and patterns.’

If you look closely at Sandra’s garden and at her paintings, you might spot unexpected items. ‘You’ll find all sorts of weird things hidden underneath and I like doing that with my paintings to make the garden seem magical,’ she says.

Likewise, she is fascinated by the shadowy areas of the landscapes she paints and often hides items in those too.: ‘The waysides are just amazing. It’s that fascination of this tangle of patterns and flowers, but not garden flowers. If you look inside it you’ll see lots of black bits – the shadows and the spaces. The spaces fascinate me and I put things into them and hide things in my paintings for whimsy.’

Near Tarland by Sandra Emslie

Birds are another motif in Sandra’s work, but she opts for the angular shapes of crows rather than smaller, cuter birds like robins. Crows can be seen in one of her landscape paintings near Migvie which bears a resemblance to Van Gogh’s Wheatfield With Crows.

‘I went up near Migvie one day and the harvest had been cut so there were masses of crows. It was a blue sky with the white moon still there. I didn’t have to play around with that, it was all there so I just painted it as it was.’

Having started her artistic career relatively late in life, Sandra enjoys plenty of success today with eight permanent works in the Grampians Hospital Trust and a piece at Aberdeen Airport.

She admits she has ‘eased off ’ in recent years and prefers to do shared exhibitions rather than solos since these are less pressurised and suit her ‘slow’ pace of work. However, with two paintings a year required by Gallery Heinzel, Milton Gallery and Larks Gallery in Ballater, she still has her work cut out – not to mention tending the huge lawn.

For more information on Sandra Emslie’s work, go to www.sandraemslie.co.uk or email sandraemslie70@gmail.com.