Artist: Dana Cowie
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 60'' x 36''

Bidding on this artwork will take place at the Live Auction event, Friday, April 10. Tickets available at the link at dvsa.ca. Absentee bids can also be placed in advance – request a form at the school office or email bid@dvsa.ca.

About This Piece
A painting of a beautiful spot in Bruce Peninsula National Park. I loved painting the contrast of the light birch trees against the blue water of Georgian Bay. I tend to abstract the landscape as I paint it, moving across the canvas in a dance, using my palette knife and oil paint. I rarely use brushes as I prefer the immediacy of thick, textured oil in large areas of colour and tone.

Biography
Dana was born into a family of artists, 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 Dana her oils, brushes, palette 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 palette knife to paint in the impasto technique (Italian for ‘mixture’), yielding a textured, sculpted surface. Her abstracted landscapes and figurative 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 settling 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 Inspirations. 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.