Emily Ponsonby: ‘I Live The Reality Of My Paintings’
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11 hours ago
A Warm Life Through Butter opens at London’s Gillian Jason Gallery on Thursday
Opening at London’s Gillian Jason Gallery this week is a new solo show by British artist Emily Ponsonby, titled A Warm Life Through Butter. Recognised by the National Portrait Gallery’s annual portrait award in 2024, Emily’s latest body of work utilises a unique encaustic beeswax technique, which lends an intriguing materiality and texture to the everyday scenes that are the artist’s subject.
Ahead of her new show, Emily has ‘emerged from the brilliantly paint-smothered blue rag-littered floor of the studio after months of work,’ she tells C&TH. ‘And I am reminding myself how to interact with the outside world. It feels good.’
We sat down with Emily to dig beneath the surface of her show – and learn more about the beeswax technique.
Meet The Artist: Emily Ponsonby
Tell us about your new exhibition at Gillian Jason Gallery, A Warm Life Through Butter.
A Warm Life Through Butter moves with the grain of human connection – intimate, tender and resonant. These paintings are breathing surfaces, built for the small rituals of gathering, for the half-said story at a table, for the comfort of hands resting near one another. What emerges is an exploration of the settings both literal and emotional – that host our shared experiences and our individual stories. I’m so grateful to be showing with such a wonderful gallery.
What are you most excited for visitors to see?
The paintings in real life and as a whole collection so they can peer into the waxy layers and see the rhythm, struggle and joy of bringing the paintings into fruition. I paint the wonderful creative souls that I live and work alongside so the narratives of our life leap across the walls from painting to painting. Someone will be writing a letter in one painting to a friend admiring a beetroot leaf in another or the dog, Romance, in ‘Tucked In’ belongs to the hands tying back curls in the next door painting. My hope is that the spaces between the works become as energetically charged as the works themselves.
Last year your painting ‘Chewing the Cud’ was selected to be exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery as part of its annual Portrait Award. Can you tell us a bit about that painting, and how it came about?
I love a conversation that snakes smoothly without being rushed, which unravels at its own pace with no set destination – where voices ebb and flow.
In ‘Chewing The Cud’, three friends sit immersed in such a conversation, deep in rural Dorset in the suntrap of the studio yard. There’s something beautifully cyclical about the process of chewing the cud. It’s nourishing, it’s gradual and it leads to contentment. Life here on an old dairy farm is similar: days are dictated by the season, by the elements and there is a curiosity and appreciation for playful creativity and its process rather than productivity. A welcoming spare chair sits patiently by, listening. The composition is distorted. One ‘chewer’ leans forward and the other leans back. This is not confrontation; it is chewing the cud.
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How did it feel to see your work in such a major institution?
So much of an artist’s life is spent alone standing at a wall with your work and thoughts swirling around, so for a painting to be recognised – seen by fresh eyes and under the same roof as some of the paintings that encouraged me to become a painter in the first place – was just incredible. It had been a dream since I was 16.
Your style is incredibly unique, and draws on a historic beeswax practice. Can you tell us more about how it works?
Over the last 14 years I have developed an encaustic technique. This involves melting and brushing beeswax and pigment into wooden panels before sculpting back into the layers and then drawing the image to the surface. Many works have ended up in the wood burner during the developmental stages – a good thing, as the push and pull and play stage is essential.
For a while, I used golden syrup coloured beeswax where the bees had collected pollen from spindly stalked wildflowers. This was problematic when creating subtle skin tones, so I changed to a lighter creamier coloured beeswax – the product of bees feeding on stockier heather and lavender – which gives the paintings a lovely warm glow.
The majority of whites in the painting’s surface are peering through from the beeswax layer below. It is such a deliciously tactile and malleable technique.
Figures are your main subject, but who are the people we see in your work?
I moved to rural Dorset in the middle of storm Eunice a few years ago and by accident landed in a village of painters, printmakers, sculptors, carpenters and writers. I live the reality of my paintings. I sketch the people with whom I share every day. The paintings are plucked from the hedgerows we walk, the kohlrabi that have just ripened and the conversations we’ve shared about love, life and the land.
Like the waves rolling in a few miles away, the process of creation here is wonderfully cyclical. A friend will photograph me in the studio sitting in front of a canvas which bears that photographer’s face with a cigarette balancing in his mouth and gently podding a broad bean. I place clues of what lights them up, maybe painting a scrap of paper by the arm of the sitter with their recent project scrawled across it.
Where You Bean by Emily Ponsonby
Where do you draw inspiration from?
Mary Oliver’s poetry has had a big influence on me for years, along with work by the Nabis painters. The latter were experts at building up flecks of colour that vibrate to create the sensation of how it feels to be inside a moment. They draw you into the work through unexpected cropping and tilted picture planes, which is an aspect I love, leaving room for you too to become part of the story.
Do you live in the town or countryside, and how does this influence your work?
I live just outside Bridport in the countryside, so I have the perks of both. I have never been more aware of the seasons changing and the weather forecast than I have while living in Dorset. I now see each day through the eyes of the local farmers needing rain for healthy grass for their livestock or of my photographer friends desperate for creeping shadows on a shoot-day or of a gardener friend elbow-deep in soil in the midst of a storm.
How would you describe your process?
Encaustic. The wax is melted down and brushed onto a primed panel. It is then scraped to smooth the surface ready for the first layer of beeswax and pigment which is buffed, scratched and rubbed into the surface. I push every painting too far so it’s too busy, too vivid, and then use the ends of brushes, blades, knives and my fingers to soften and simplify the surface, allowing it to breathe once again.
I work on multiple paintings at a time so that tones, marks and methods roll across them all as a whole; they are in conversation with each other as much as I am with them.
There is always one sacrificial lamb for every show… One painting that retaliates and fights but where my most precious lessons are learnt.
Emily Ponsonby: ‘I push every painting too far.’
Tell us about your studio: where is it, what is it filled with, what might surprise us?
My studio is part of a farmyard of cows, studios, tangled blackberry bushes and swooping swallows come the summer months. I’m so lucky to share a yard with people to say good morning to, borrow milk from and to get a second opinion on a stubborn painting. I would go mad if I didn’t have them.
I am never out of coco or 90 percent dark chocolate, as they keep my eyes wide when painting into the night. I’m on a mission to elevate the wonderful intricacies of vegetables to the status of cut flowers so there is usually rainbow chard, cavolo nero or a kohlrabi in a vase on my desk too.
Do you have a favourite painting of your own?
I keep a painting from every exhibition. Usually, it’s the sacrificial lamb of the show. The painting that took the brunt of all my exploration and I can’t bear to part with.
Anything else exciting in the pipeline you’d like to share?
I will be part of a group show, CAIM, at Slane Castle, Ireland with Aspara Studio in September which I’m really looking forward to.
MY HEART BLEEDS FOR YOU by Emily Ponsonby
The Culture Radar, With Artist Emily Ponsonby
What I’m reading… Letters To A Young Poet by Rilke on repeat
The last thing I watched (and loved) was… More ‘listened to’: the dialogue of Fake or Fortune as I worked late into the early hours. Technology is nuts now regarding discovering the underlayers of old masters, dating the pigments and figuring out if it’s done by the hand of the artist in question.
What I’m most looking forward to seeing… Autumn
Favourite film of all time… ‘Happiness isn’t happiness without a violin playing goat’… It has to be Notting Hill
Band/singer I always have on repeat… The Gloaming
Favourite album of all time… Francoise Hardy’s Tous les garcons et les filles. It takes me home to sunny Saturdays years ago, going into town in a red leather seat Morris Minor to get my dad and brothers haircut.
Favourite UK gallery or museum… Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh – an old Glasite meeting house with an incredible hexagonal stained glass ceiling.
Favourite walk… For miles, sodden to the bone in South Uist
My order at the bar… A pint or a dirty vodka martini in an ice-cold glass
My ultimate cultural recommendation… John Soane Museum
Cultural guilty pleasure… Foreign supermarkets
Emily Ponsonby: A Warm Life Through Butter
11 September to 19 October 2025 at Gillian Jason Gallery (19 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 8AZ), open Tuesday to Friday 10am to 6pm, and Saturdays 11am to 4pm.
