Drea Cohane / If But For The

Drea Cohane is a visual artist who lives and works from the city of Kitchener-Waterloo. Due to a brain injury, Drea was inspired to take up art as a means of building new neural pathways. What started out as an effort to enhance brain plasticity, has now become a lifelong creative endeavour.

Drea is fascinated by human nature; more specifically, by the interior lives we carry within us. These enigmatic inner landscapes are mostly kept hidden from a passerby, but will sometimes, and often fleetingly, reveal themselves in a passing gesture or look. In her portraits, Drea looks to capture a quality or expression through the use of colour and contour that distills something of the interior life of a person. Whether it's just a mere glimpse of what's going on under the surface, there is always an urgent sense of a passing mood playing out before the viewer.