* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Andrea Kowch holds a BFA from College for Creative Studies in her native Michigan.
Largely self-taught and influenced by the work of American Masters and the Old Masters of the Renaissance, Kowch paints in a controlled manner with close attention symbolism and mood.
The allegorical side of her work is intended to draw parallels between human experience and the natural world. The lonely and desolate American landscape reflects the human soul, symbolizing all things powerful, fragile, and eternal, she says.
Kowch has received numerous honors and exhibited in Capitol Hill, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Diane von Furstenberg Gallery, and Margulies Collection, among others. Her work has been collected nationwide and in Canada.
"I love everything about her paintings.... The rich colors, the strange luminous light - like the characters are stuck in a weirdly bright cloudy day, the wind that blows through every deceptively calm scene and catches every one's hair creating a sense of foreboding chaos, the bucolic life in the foreground while natural disasters are happening off in the distance, animals often misbehaving in the periphery , and women (sisters?) usually at the center of it all. I could definitely go on."
"These painting remind me of J.W. Waterhouse and the other preRaphaelites. I always loved that stuff. It's all so odd and dreamlike and pretty. My favorite Kowch picture is called Dream Chaser. I can't tell what's happening exactly but it's beautiful and the colors are incredible-- so warm, like those great dark moments before a summer afternoon storm. Wait, maybe that's what's happening!"
