Bellefonte artist captures big ideas in miniature landscapes

When it comes to art, bigger is not necessarily better.

Bellefonte resident Emily Eifert Brown is living proof of that maxim – the landscapes she paints are barely an inch across.

But Brown, who shows and sells her tiny paintings at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, is a landscape artist by accident.

In fact, growing up in southern New Jersey, she never planned to be an artist at all, she said. But after unexpectedly winning first place in her school’s art fair, the 12-year-old Brown began taking an interest in drawing.

She aspired to be a children’s book illustrator and enrolled in the illustration program at Moore.

Illustration was an intense program, she said, and she found herself looking for a way to relax after a long day of very careful sketching.

So she started dabbing watercolors onto scraps of left over illustration board after she finished all her illustration homework.

“It was my way of winding down,” she said. “I was really just observing what the watercolor did.”

She would paint one color onto a scrap of paper and then paint another color to see how the two looked together, she said.

Her little experiments began fueling her creativity and when Brown took an independent study a few semesters later, she spent an entire academic year painting the tiny landscapes.

After graduating, she still wanted to illustrate children’s books and tried to self promote her work and land an illustration job, she said, but her heart wasn’t in it the way it used to be.

Eventually, she decided to turn her efforts fully to painting the tiny landscapes.

“The paintings really speak more about who I am,” she said. “They have a very unique voice.”

She draws inspiration for her landscapes from places she’s travelled, she said, and the view of the horizon from her grandparent’s South Jersey farm.

“I love to be able to see the horizon,” she said. “It’s the interaction between the earth and sky and what happens there.”

But despite her paintings’ diminutive size, Brown does not use a teensy paintbrush - simply because those brushes don’t hold enough paint.

She begins by turning on some music, mixing a few water colors, selecting a canvas size and beginning to dab paint into a 1-inch by 2-inch square on a white board.

In a few hours, she can paint 20 or 30 miniature landscapes, she said, but she lets them rest for a few days before she decides which ones are keepers.

“My fear is that I’ll do too many and I’ll start to run out of things to paint,” she said.

There is one big advantage to painting small: it’s easier for her work to be spontaneous, she said. Larger paintings have more details and take more time, she said, but she can be bold and daring with her work and, if it doesn’t turn out, she only wasted a few minutes and a small amount of paint.

She loves how everyone who looks at her paintings sees something different in the landscape and remembers a totally unique event, she said.

But her painting has taken a backseat to her studies – the Brandywine Hundred resident is preparing for the art conservation program at Winterthur, where she plans to enroll in next year.

And even though she doesn’t have as much time to paint as she used to, she said she still enjoys playing with watercolors on tiny canvasses.

“The paintings are very much the heart and soul of me,” she said. “This is my voice as an artist.”