Clouds drift over a colourful coastal scene by artist Emma Cownie. Framed and mounted.

Born in Hereford and educated in Cardiff, Emma Cownie is a Swansea-based contemporary artist specializing in oil paintings. Creatively driven all her life, Cownie loved drawing and sketching as a teenager, drawing with oil pastels and screen print-making in her twenties and finally focussed on photography and oil painting in adult life.

A professional artist since 2012, she paints most days and focuses on light and colour, whether in rural landscapes, urban streets, seascapes or figurative work. Cownie paints people walking around in their everyday lives, painting moods, anticipations and atmospheres, endeavouring to express presence and pathos. Fascinated by details and relationships, she hopes to capture what usually escapes the eye.

Drawn to light and shadows and how they shape our emotions, Cownie recalls visiting the South of France as a teenager and being mesmerized by the dazzling light. She has been attempting to capture that excitement about light in her paintings ever since. She aims to make people look at the ordinary and see the extraordinary beauty in it.

Much of her work is inspired by American and Canadian artists, mainly American realist painters who paint the quiet, the spacious and the still and revere a certain treatment of light and colour. Artists such as Edward Hopper, Jim Holland, John Register, Frank Hobbs as well as Contemporary Minimalists such as Christopher Benson, Leah Giberson, Tom McKinley, Mitchell Johnson, Jessica Brilli and Emmett Kerrigan, inspire Cownie to bring an American sensibility to Welsh urban and rural landscapes.