ABOUT

Emily Cowan is a self-taught fine arts painter working primarily with acrylic gouache.  In a style she has named “architectural portraiture”, her work focuses on houses, apartments, and domestic interiors.  She uses bright colours and architectural forms to explore themes of housing justice, the emotional weight and global injustice of the housing crisis, and the shared humanity people express through the decoration and presentation of the buildings they inhabit and the homes they make.

Rooted in personal longing and social critique, her paintings are both homage and protest: depicting homes she deeply admires but could never afford to own and care for.  Every building she paints is a real building somewhere, based upon the artist’s own photographs.  A hallmark of Cowan’s style is meticulous detail work, highlighting not just the architecture of the building but the personal choices the home’s inhabitants have chosen to display, making her work intimate and deeply human.

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Cowan has been fascinated with homes and how people make them since childhood; she fondly remembers playing “house”, exploring every nook and cranny of the homes of her parents’ friends, driving around with her mother fantasizing about different beautiful houses and of course, creating little houses of her own through childhood art, building blocks, dollhouses and other childhood play.  ​A homebody by nature, Cowan aims to connect others to the feeling of home as a human right, a universal place of escape and safety, and to highlight the disparity of who in our society has permanent access to these things and who does not.

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Cowan exhibited her first solo show in 2025 and has participated in numerous group shows across Vancouver and the lower mainland.  She has a second solo show scheduled for September 2026.  With over 30 commissions to date, her art (both custom and original) is part of dozens of private collections and has also been highlighted by local media.

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