Emily Contino

Emily is a student artist completing her BFA in Painting at New England College. At 26 years old, she has been practicing art for almost a decade but her aptitude for creativity and painting began at age four.

Emily’s paintings are thickly layered in acrylics, texture mediums, inks, and oils and explore the essence of the physical and the ethereal through bold mark making and airy blended brush strokes. Her art is inspired by nature, emotion, and literature. She investigates themes of atmosphere and world building through paint.

Inspired by the Impressionist movement, she built a foundation working in oil landscape painting which developed into the techniques and style shown today. Her art references the timelessness of painting throughout art history and nods to her artistic influences, such as JMW Turner, Anselm Kiefer, Elly Smallwood, and Christopher Volpe. She has exhibited in the Roger Williams Gallery and the Lyceum Gallery in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Emily’s current work is hazy, heavily textured, and abstracted. It is an excavation of the atmospheric limbo of mental illness and domestic violence, and these abstracted scenes have developed into an expressive refuge. By deconstructing the compositions, elements of landscape devolve from subject to suggestion, a connection to the intricate and inexplicable essence of becoming and unbecoming.