Prize-winning artist Cornelia Emery is a contemporary painter whose love of the natural world informs her work. Attracted to the effects of light on the landscape as well as on the interior still life, she encourages viewers to experience the pleasures of form, color, and the drawn line as they shape the universality of the moment.

Born on the East Coast, she graduated from Smith College, where she studied with Leonard Baskin, and attended Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts) and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she studied with Elizabeth Osborne. She has traveled extensively, with longest stays in India, England, and France. Today she lives and works in Carmel, California. She is a founding member of the Monterey Bay Plein Air Painters Association (MBPAPA)

Emery’s aim is to capture a sense of time and place in her paintings. She wants each mark on the canvas to seem both effortless and inevitable. Painting on location and from the object is an integral part of the process. She feels that it is only by facing life that one can hope to grasp its essence and capture that essence on the canvas.

Emery has participated in solo and group shows in California and Philadelphia. Her paintings are in private collections throughout the United States and Europe.