Marie Hines Cowan (b. 1967 Brooklyn, NY) is a figurative oil painter marrying mythology with colloquial culture. Her work is narrative, life-sized, and representational, thoughunconstrained by realism. Hines Cowan’s work is bold, colorful, and painterly, but alsographic and illustrative.
Hines Cowan received her art degree from FIT studying Fashion Illustration though she was more interested in fine art than commercial art. During those years two events changed her trajectory, the 1900 Vienna exhibition came to New York City and photography began to takeover from fashion illustration. She continued at FIT wildly influenced by the AustrianSecessionists and getting an incredible education in the human figure. After FIT Hines Cowanwent on to study classical literature at NYU.
Hines Cowan has been exhibiting in the US and Europe since 1979 in group and solo exhibits and more recently art fairs. In 2024 she will be exhibiting work at the European Cultural Centre’s Biennial in Vience. Hines Cowan has curated exhibits and was the exhibition chair and the President of the National Association of Women Artists. She has spoken on art on The Artist Forum TV, on various radio programs, at Yale’s 2014 Women in Leadership Conference, and artist talks with the art students at her local high school. In the fall of 2024, she worked with high school art students during her solo exhibition as part of the symposium, Musing, Metamorphoses and Medea, Hines Cowan created with two other scholars, Claire E. Scott, and Valentina Motta, at New Rochelle’s Museum of Arts and Cultural. Motta and Scott have used Hines Cowan’s work in their recent books on Greek mythology. Hines Cowan’s artwork has also been published in several literary and artjournals.
Hines Cowan’s illustration education has led her to combine the graphic qualities of commercial art with traditional painting. She finds this collision between the flatness of Pop Art and the modeling of atelier painting endlessly fascinating. Recently she has taken her work beyond the flatness of the canvas and has begun creating three- dimensional installations of her paintings as a room-sized graphic novel extending artwork and the sculptural text off the walls.
55 Webster Ave., Studio 306, New Rochelle, NY 10801