Claire Cowie: Panorama Drawing

This iteration of Viewpoints features Panorama Drawing (2003), a large gouache and watercolor painting by Seattle-based artist Claire Cowie (U.S., born 1975) made during the artist’s residency at the Henry in 2003. Cowie made this painting over a duration of three weeks, repeatedly rearranging a series of hybrid, animal-like sculptures (also produced by the artist during the residency) across a long shelf and continuously repainting the scene as it changed. The resulting surface is an accumulation of layered marks that resists a linear narrative and instead evokes an enigmatic dream-like space between documentation and fantasy. Within the sediment of paint, figures mutate and shift, conjuring a sort of fairy-tale uncanny with identifiable forms coming in and out of view and disappearing into veils of paint. 

Claire Cowie is a Full-Time Lecturer in the Interdisciplinary Visual Arts Program at the University of Washington. She has received many awards for her work, including a Pollock-Krasner Grant and fellowships from the Washington State Arts Commission, Artist Trust, Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and the Behnke Foundation.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website