About the Artist
Have you ever visited the English Lake District? Well, if you have, I haven’t any words that would add to your romance and love of this magical place in the UK. Everyone visiting Cumbria’s heaven on earth, nurtures individual feelings to describe the mountains and valleys interspersed by silvan carpets of open water. That draw you back time and time again. When I was still a baby, my parents took me to Keswick and Ullswater. My story began in the very early 1960’s. Mainly staying in a small camp site called Dobbies. By the time I was a young adult, the Lake District had become as precious and familiar to me as the roads and forests of my own home in the Derwent Valley. Like so many who feel the music of this place. It made me feel I wanted to become an artist. The music I saw all around me filled me with emotional uplifting feeling, silent but powerful it became my ever present friend. Even when I wasn’t there, my spirit was flying me through the valley’s and reliving every happy moment of every special day with my parents spent wandering in harmony far away from the realities of work. I can’t thank my parents enough for showing me what this manmade natural heaven can be. I did not realise just how lucky in health and surrounded by unconditional love I had been. This was my most happy time in life. I did not lack for anything. My family have always been small in number. Yet, somehow, I thought there were dozen’s of us across the world. I never once felt as though I might be the last or that in fact Cumbria was where my father’s family had come from. Somehow, a full circle has been completed and it will close forever for all of us, when I die.
I will leave my inheritance to an often indifferent world. In my art forms, a family history book, a handful of tapestry’s, poetry and paintings. Hopefully, the best memories of everything my whole family has been in life.
Who am I?
I love to paint in oils, and now that I am retired, I can follow my dream. Painting whatever touches me where ever I go. A painting can evoke all sorts of emotions. Something special to hang on your wall. Carefully hand-painted, a one-off, not mass-produced.
The painting below is not for sale, as it was done from memory and no longer exists in the real world. It is the home of my father’s mother, Mary Cowing. This is where my father grew up with his sisters and brothers. A very plain one-bedroomed miners' terraced house. Built in the mid 1800s by Joseph Cowen a Parliamentary MP and coal prospector in the Derwent Valley. He provided for my family a home with regular employment, and he was a major part of the growth of the tiny village of Rowlands Gill. Originally, the land belonged to the Earls of Strathmore. The ancestral family of our own Queen Elizabeth II of Gibside Estates. There has been a building on this site since the 1200s. The Estates and land are painted famously by Turner. Now owned by the National Trust who are carefully managing and restoring the buildings which Our Queen Mother knew very well when she was a child. Furniture from the Gibside Estate was removed to Glamis Castle in Scotland when the roof was removed from the old Hall to save taxes.
But those are the former high and mighty of our lovely village who are now long gone. The unassuming terraced houses over—looked by their Landlords is where my family lived their real life which was hard won with grit and sweat and blood working in the Lilley Drift Pit or the Lilley Brick Works. This is where my father was born, in tiny number 19 Cowen Terrace, and it was in the atmosphere of war and great change where he and his brothers and sisters grew up. From the years of the horse and carriage, right up to our first walk on the moon and beyond. Number 19, number 6, number 9, and number 24 Cowen Terrace are our ancestral homes in the Derwent Valley, near Newcastle upon Tyne.
