Emily Ponsonby and the Warmth Between Us

Working in beeswax and oil pigment, the British painter and printmaker gives form to the quiet exchanges that hold people together.

There is often a place for the viewer in an Emily Ponsonby painting.

A chair waits at the edge of a gathering. A table tilts towards us. Figures talk, rest, prepare food, or sit comfortably in one another’s company, absorbed in the small rituals through which closeness becomes visible. The scenes feel observed, but never remote. We are not simply looking at them; we are being invited in.

Born in 1990, Ponsonby is a British painter and printmaker living and working in the South West of England. Her practice explores intimacy, touch, and human connection through layered surfaces of beeswax and oil paint. Raised by a hobbyist beekeeper, she began experimenting with wax early in life and has since developed an encaustic process that has become central to her work.

Each painting begins on a wooden panel. Molten beeswax is poured and buffed into the prepared surface before pigment is gradually introduced. Ponsonby then builds, removes, and returns—using blades, brush ends, and her fingers to scrape, soften, obscure, and coax the image into view. The finished surface retains evidence of that negotiation: ridges, abrasions, translucent passages, and flashes of color held within the wax.

The process gives her paintings a particular kind of warmth. Skin, fabric, food, and afternoon light seem to sit within the material rather than simply on top of it. From across a room, a composition may first register as a gathering of bodies and color. Closer inspection reveals the physical history of the work—the marks added, erased, and allowed to remain.

Ponsonby trained at City & Guilds of London Art School, Leith School of Art in Edinburgh, and the Royal Drawing School. Her work in painting, drawing, etching, and monotype shares an interest in emergence: images are not imposed neatly upon a surface but found through repetition, reduction, and a willingness to let the material redirect the hand.

Her subjects are drawn from the life around her. After moving to rural Dorset, Ponsonby became part of a community of painters, printmakers, sculptors, carpenters, and writers. Friends appear among hedgerows, gardens, studios, and shared tables. A ripening vegetable, a resting hand, or an unfinished conversation may become as important to a painting as the figure at its center.

In Chewing the Cud, selected for the National Portrait Gallery’s 2024 Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award, three friends sit in conversation in a sunlit studio yard. Their bodies lean in different directions while an empty chair remains nearby. Nothing decisive appears to be happening, and that is precisely what gives the painting its presence: it attends to time spent together without destination or performance.

That attention continued in Ponsonby’s 2025 body of work, A Warm Life Through Butter, which centered on shared spaces and the relationships unfolding within them. Rather than arranging each scene around a single protagonist, the paintings hold several overlapping narratives—glances, gestures, objects, and conversations passing between one person and another.

Ponsonby’s work belongs naturally within a home, not because it simply depicts domestic life, but because it understands how meaning gathers there. Through meals repeated, stories retold, and familiar people returning to the same chairs, ordinary rooms become records of connection.

Her paintings give that intimacy a surface: warm, worked, and marked by touch.