Electra Painting

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, though unconstrained by realism. Hines Cowan’s work is bold, colorful, and painterly, but also graphic and illustrative. Since 1979, Hines Cowan has been exhibiting in the US and Europe in group and solo exhibits and recently as part of art fairs. She served as the exhibition chair and the President of the National Association of Women Artists. In addition to her visual art, Hines Cowan is a sought-after speaker on the arts who has participated in The Artist Forum TV, radio programs, Yale’s 2014 Women in Leadership Conference, podcasts, and exhibition talks. In 2023, Hines Cowan had a solo exhibition as part of the symposium, Musing, Metamorphoses, and Medea, created with scholars, Claire E. Scott, and Valentina Motta, at New Rochelle’s Museum of Arts and Cultural. Motta and Scott used Hines Cowan’s work in their recent books on Greek mythology. Hines Cowan’s artwork has also been published in several literary and art journals. In 2024 she will be exhibiting work at the European Cultural Centre’s Biennial in Vience. Hines Cowan received her art degree from FIT (1985-89), studying Illustration, with a keen interest in fine art. During those years two events changed her trajectory, the 1900 Vienna exhibition came to New York City and photography began to take prominence over fashion illustration. She became wildly influenced by the Secessionists and devoted much of her education to the study of the human figure. Hines Cowan went on to study Greek literature at NYU (1995-2000). Hines Cowan’s educational training in illustration led her to combine the graphic qualities of commercial art with traditional painting. She is fascinated by the collision of Pop Art’s flatness with the modeling of atelier painting. Recent work transcends the flatness of the canvas; three-dimensional installations of her paintings create a room-sized graphic novel where artwork and sculptural text stretch off the walls.