Dana Cowie

Dana was born into a family of ar sts, fashion designers and musicians. At the age of three, she was quite certain that she would become a painter. At 17, her painter grandmother gifted her oils, brushes, pale e and easel with the proviso that she make regular use of them. Dana sees the world around her as shapes of varying colour, tone and feeling. She uses a pale e knife to paint in the impasto technique (Italian for mixture’), yielding a textured, sculpted surface. Her abstracted landscapes and figura ve works, predominately in oils, emerge as layers of colour overlapping in expressionist marks. When in studio, Dana paints primarily upon her grandmother’s vintage 1940s easel. Born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario, Dana enrolled in the visual arts program at Central Technical School in Toronto in the 1990s. It was then that she found she had a driving need to paint. Dana lived in Toronto, Japan, Victoria, B.C. and Owen Sound, Ontario before se ling in Collingwood, Ontario where she lives with her boyfriend and two daughters.

The surrounding natural landscapes, as well as scenes from her many travels, are her main sources of inspira ons. Dana’s work can be found in art galleries across Canada, the U.S. and England as well as in numerous solo and group exhibitions in those countries and collections worldwide.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I paint in order to give shape to the way I think and see the world. I was meant to make paintings; it’s my principle form of self-expression. I love the physical act of painting, of bringing to life an image of a place that I have experienced with all my senses, of translating the way I look at the world onto canvas.
My ambition—and I think I have seen some success—is to create paintings that are active and alive. I love juxtaposing different shapes and finding new colour relationships that create vibration and optical illusion. I paint abstracted landscapes and figurative works in oils, with a palette knife, using an impasto, painterly technique. I work back and forth across the canvas, creating textural, expressionist marks; layers of colour that overlap as the image emerges. It’s a technique that I’ve developed over years of practice. The result is images that are both abstract and representational.
I live in a small town on the shore of Georgian Bay, part of Lake Huron. The Niagara Escarpment runs just south of town, snaking up the Bruce Peninsula. I am surrounded by nature, which is my greatest inspiration. Wherever I go, near and far, I find scenes that captivate me; I just can’t wait to take those images back to my studio and bring them to life.