Details

Name

James Cowie

Brief Biography

1886 - 1956, Scottish

Occupation

Artist

Description

Brought up on an Aberdeenshire farm, Cowie’s absorbing interest as a child was in literature. In 1906 he began studying for a degree in English literature at Aberdeen University but at the same time he entered the United Free Church Training College in order to qualify as a teacher. The art teacher, James Hector, exerted such a strong influence on Cowie that he gave up his university studies, passed his teacher-training examinations in drawing and became an art master at Fraserburgh Academy in 1909.

From 1912 to 1914 Cowie studied at Glasgow School of Art and was subsequently appointed art master at Bellshill Academy, near Glasgow. During the 1914-18 war period, Cowie was a conscientious objector and worked for the Pioneer Corps near Edinburgh. After the war he returned to Bellshill Academy where his pupils inspired many of his most important compositions.

Cowie exhibited his paintings regularly in Glasgow and Edinburgh in the 1920s but it was not until 1935, when he was nearly 50, that he held his first one-man show at the McLellan Galleries, Glasgow. The same year he was appointed Head of Painting at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen.

He spent the years 1937-48 as Warden of Hospitalfield, Arbroath where his pupils included Robert Colquhoun, Robert MacBryde and Joan Eardley.

Cowie’s paintings during the 1920s and 30s are characterized by a balanced, harmonious formality which gave way in the 1940s to an interest in Surrealism and a more complex spatial arrangement. These intriguing aspects of his art mark Cowie out as a painter of considerable individuality.