The semi-finalist is: anna fidler

The Future
2025, gouache on linen, 72x64"

A follower of Anna Fidler’s work for at least two decades, I only recently had the pleasure of meeting her in person. And only more recently did I have a chance to visit her home and studio in Corvallis, Oregon, a small city in the Willamette Valley ringed by farmland and home to Oregon State University. 
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Entering Fidler’s work space confirms my long-held theory that she's an artist who is naturally predisposed to developing multiple projects at the same time and committing to each for the long haul. It’s a temperament that - combined with seemingly endless energy, intellect, and drive - allows Fidler to drill deep and mine everything she can out of countless ideas and aesthetic impulses. On the day I visit, at least three approaches to painting are immediately visible, with more to be uncovered later in drawers and on shelves. Like discrete but related visual languages, each appears as its own dialect, sharing a foundational grammar with the others through color, shape, and line. A common interest in energy and its relationship to both spirituality and physics runs through each body of work, further tying them all together. 

Inspired by mysticism, myth, professional sports, auras, animals, science, and more, Fidler’s paintings don’t tell specific stories so much as present characters and scenes that hint at a narrative. Her Spirit Elevators, at just over 4 feet tall with deep, glowing palettes inspired by Art Deco from the 1920’s and 1930’s, appear ready to slide open and invite us in for a ride. Each is designed to metaphorically transport the viewer to another plane, and each has the added benefit of acting as a literal visual lift. They are, in short, a delight to the eyes.

Fidler’s cut paper collages are a color-saturated take on gothic intrigue mixed with a pastry chef’s love of mille-feuille. Theatrically staged in oneiric forests and familiar interiors, her obsessive layering fuses painting with low-relief sculpture. The resulting figures and animals, far from being mere confections, pulse with a hypnotic rhythm. In “Maypole,” for example, we are witnessing a moment of connection and transference between the figures depicted.  The layered human forms also push out and into the viewer’s space, a tactile reminder that energy flows in all directions. 

I’m still feeling the energy that transferred to me during my July visit to Anna Fidler’s studio, and I’m so happy to be able to share my interview with her here on The Semi-Finalist. 

     - David Schell

Anna Fidler in her studio with a Spirit Elevator from 2023.

The Semi-Finalist: I like to start most of my interviews by getting to know a little bit about the background of the artist. Can you talk about your formative years and your path to becoming the artist you are now?

Anna Fidler:  I was a shy child. I had an art teacher in elementary school who recognized this quality and opened his art classroom doors at lunchtime to those of us who were less socially inclined to work on paintings. Along with several other young students, I painted on canvases for the first time. My art teacher's name was Dan Lisuk, and he was and still is a practicing artist in Northern Michigan known for his gestural figurative work. As I grew up, I fell in love with poetry. I embraced Emily Dickinson, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, William Blake, Anais Nin, Richard Brautigan, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and so many more. I often walked to the Boardman River in Traverse City with a calligraphy pen, ink and a notebook to write poems and draw. When I was fifteen, I did the same thing in rural Ireland as an exchange student. This is when I decided to apply to Interlochen Arts Academy (now Interlochen Center for the Arts) to study creative writing and visual art. I used my ink drawings of writers (Brautigan, Wilde, Plath) and my poetry from my walks to apply for a scholarship, which I was awarded and afforded me a year to study with writers/educators Michael Delp and Jack Driscoll and a wonderful bunch of wildly creative, self-motivated students. As a daughter of two public school teachers, I never would have been able to attend the prestigious IAA without a scholarship. It changed my life to work alongside others, who fully immersed themselves in the creative arts from dawn until nightfall. After Interlochen, I attended Northwestern Michigan College continuing my art studies and saving money to study French and Art History in Paris at the Alliance Française. I wanted to leave Michigan-- to paint and write in the same city as my heroes-- Amedeo Modigliani, Josephine Baker (with her pet cheetah), Henry Miller, Colette, Tamara de Lempicka, Djuna Barnes and so many others. While there, I painted every day, waking up early to write for an hour or two before leaving for class. I walked to Sennelier to buy canvases and paint, and worked most evenings on my table at the pension. I decided to be a career artist while living in Paris. I was eighteen. Leaving Europe to return to Michigan was hard. I enrolled as a full-time art student at Western Michigan University, where my grandparents had been academics for decades. Kalamazoo was not Paris, but I found my way, meeting some of my closest lifelong friends in the Art and English departments. I began playing music in a band and with these friends, moved across the country to Portland in 1995, where the music scene was in full-swing. My band, The Sensualists, formed in 1997 and we toured and released albums. Huge influences were Stereolab and Broadcast; the latter we played a couple shows with around the Pacific Northwest. Portland in the 90's was my equivalent of Paris in the '20's. It was affordable and magical-- buildings were beautifully decayed and moss covered. There was a sense of optimism and things were rarely well-documented. I loved the early electronic and experimental film scene; we bought a Farfisa organ and Univox drum machine from a pawn shop for around $100, and played shows at Acapulco's Gold, EJ's, Satyricon, and La Luna. I worked on my artwork in the morning, was a nanny by day and played music at night. Around then, my early paper collages of long horizontal landscapes were accepted by curator Bruce Guenther into the Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum. This felt like a clear sign that my creative journey in the Pacific Northwest was on the right track. 

Early collages from the 1990's.

S-F: ​Tell me about your materials and techniques. How did you start using them and how do you see them relating to your ideas?

AF: In my twenties, I worked on paper. It was an affordable medium and my studio was my bedroom. I made hundreds of long horizontal cut-paper collages depicting elaborate imagined landscapes. My favorite artists were self-taught. During this time, I discovered the work of Henry Darger and Eugene Von Bruenchenhein when my plane was delayed by a snowstorm in Chicago. I visited the Carl Hammer Gallery, where Carl showed me his extensive collection of Dargers and opened a closet full of Von Bruenchenhein chicken bone sculptures. I loved Darger's long horizontal format and used it for many years in my art. As my work evolved to a larger scale, I continued to use paper for its inexpensive 'accessible to all' quality. In the early 2000's I began using Holbein Acryla gouache and diluted fluid acrylics. I liked the thick matte quality of the gouache and the transparent unpredictable quality of the watered-down acrylics. I experimented with colored pencils on top of painted surfaces in my 'Vampires of Oregon' series and responded to the play of transparency and opacity in both mediums. As my ideas evolved, my mediums followed. I now paint on paper and stretched linen canvases using Holbein acrylic gouache and sometimes Lefranc Bourgeois flashe, a vinyl paint also known for its matte quality. The matte quality of the paint makes surfaces recede spatially. Conceptually, my paintings are about the unknown-- places, energy, individuals. I respond to how painted surfaces can give off illusions of depth and at times, change our perceptions of space entirely.

Above: High School Girl from Salem
2010, acrylic and colored pencil on paper, 48x36"

Below: Arlie
2012, acrylic and colored pencil on paper, 99"x72"

(from the "Vampires of Oregon" series)

S-F:  Anna, I think of you as both a sensitive colorist and an artist that is unafraid of chromatic intensity. How did that combination develop? Or was it always there in your work?

AF: I start a painting with color. Subjects come second. I am an intuitive artist, so I look for a color combination that I am in tune with each day. I lay the tubes of paint out on my table and think about what I want to do with them. This can take a long time. I have always worked this way. It used to be a palette of colored paper scraps laid out on a desk. I now teach color theory, but before I learned to teach this subject, I was already performing experiments with chroma, intensity, hue and contrast. Pretty much the same experiments of Albers and Itten, but I didn't have the vocabulary. When I first started teaching color theory, I was nervous that my knowledge from the Bauhaus color theorists might eliminate or influence my intuitive approach. Over time, I discovered that intuition does not dissipate with knowledge. I have grown to enjoy learning the history of color, and of those who first put words to their own intuitive ideas. ​

Above: A layered energy portrait on the studio wall.

Below: Metamorphasis
2020, gouache on handmade grid paper, 66x58"

S-F: I really respond to the variety of themes that take up residence in your work - vampires, energy portraits, elevators, and more. Talk about all of that.

AF: My work explores energy as a liminal force—something that exists between body and spirit. I am interested in states of suspension and transition—and how these experiences might be made visible. Painting is my way to translate personal experience into visual form, to process and transform. My series, Vampires and Wolf Men (2010-2014) includes monumental portraits of individuals from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as vampires and werewolves (no evidence of vampirism is depicted; instead the viewer must use their imagination). The subject’s innate romanticism fused with a form of energy exchange; in this case the transference of life from one being to another, appeals to me. I make artwork about human energy - heat, emotions and lived experiences. I construct bodies from layers of glued paper to represent a person’s energy. Tracing silhouettes with colored pencil, I cut shapes that form dimensional, topographic people. These paintings are from an ongoing series I began in 2005 called "Energy Portraits". 

Above: Light Catcher
2023, colored pencil and flashe on panel, 30x24x2"
(from the ongoing Energy Portraits series)
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Below: layered Energy Potraits in storage 

Continued...
​Several years ago, I began to notice how my own body's energy was changing. I had end stage renal failure, and my artistic practice led me to questions such as how to visually represent energetic transformations from life to death, whether people have spirits and if so, how spirits depart from their bodies, where they go and what it would feel like. As a teenager, I had an out of body experience. I floated above my body connected by a single thread. I have never done this again, but I often imagine that spirit travel might be similar. Feeling less in my body as my health deteriorated, I imagined the design of machinery for spiritual ascension. The resulting body of work was called ‘Spirit Elevators’, which acted as portals for beings to cross into another realm. In July 2025, I received a life-saving kidney transplant from a close friend, an experience that reshaped my understanding of time and the space I hold within it. Post-transplant my work is evolving towards a deepened engagement with questions of embodiment, healing and transformation. My current research is a collaboration with an astrophysicist at Oregon State University named Sanjana Curtis. I am making work about how the elements are made from exploding stars-- kilonovas, neutron star mergers-- some of which are found and transformed within our human bodies. ​

Above: Spirit Elevator for Cats
2024, gouache on linen, 28x20"
(from the ongoing "Spirit Elevator" series)

S-F: ​I’m fascinated by artists that are temperamentally suited to letting their creativity take on various personas, and it was so satisfying to visit your studio and see the different ways that you allow your work to develop all in one space. Tell me how that came about.

AF: ​I follow my curiosity. Do people really change much from when they were young? I remember being scared walking through cemeteries when I was a child. I thought the dead could feel my footsteps-- my energy. I didn't want to disturb them. I loved books like Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt about a family who drank from a spring that gave them eternal life. When I was ten years old, I began collecting Victorian dresses because I could touch the fabric and feel the energy of the women who once wore them. I was obsessed as a teenager (and still am) with the mother-daughter connection of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. I daydream often of the metempsychosis practiced by the Irish revolutionary and actress, Maude Gonne, and her spiritual connection and shared lucid dreams with W.B. Yeats. My work is rooted in my curiosity with the unknown. Even in my current body of work that speaks the language of astrophysics-- there are more questions than answers.

Above: Maypole
2008, acrylic and gouache on paper, 50x40"

Below: Metempsychosis Wallpaper
2019, gouache and flashe on handmade grid paper, 40x18"

Above: Altar Cards
Another series in Fidler's studio that explores energy and mystery. Each card has a phrase or combination of words on the back that relate to the moment or day the card was made. They are not so much about the future, but the present.

S-F: ​At times your work delves into the empirical as much as the spiritual. Can you talk about your recent collaboration with the astrophysicist Sanjana Curtis? How did this partnership start and what are you working on together?

AF: Earlier this year, I was awarded a Faculty Collaborative Fellowship from PRAx (the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Arts) at Oregon State University. This fellowship asks artists and scientists to collaborate on a project. I am currently working closely with OSU Astrophysicist, Sanjana Curtis, whose interests include the origin of elements, especially those created by the core collapse of supernovae and merging neutron stars. Sanjana’s favorite areas of research are violent and energetic explosions. We meet regularly in her office or my studio to discuss our current research. Currently, Sanjana is writing a book and I am working with her to learn more about elemental origin stories; ultimately, I am making new illustrations for the periodic table. One of my greatest influences is the book ‘Thought Forms’ by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater (1905), who felt that thoughts, emotions, experiences and music can take on form. They wrote about and created beautiful images portraying these ideas. Likewise, I am learning about elements such as lithium, helium, hydrogen, fluorine, and oxygen and creating images that are derived from their qualities. For example, lithium floats on water, so my drawings include simple shapes representing the idea of flotation and water. Fluorine is both beautiful and dangerous, so my drawing takes on beguiling and sublime qualities. I recently showed the drawings to Sanjana and she was able to guess most of the elements accurately the first time. I will spend the next year making paintings about elemental energy as well as neutrinos, which are tiny particles from the sun and other cosmic events like exploding stars passing through us all the time without electric charge or any known reason. The project will be shown at PRAx in Corvallis in winter 2028.

Above and below: works in progress for a collaborative project with the Oregon State University Astrophysicist Sanjana Curtis. 

S-F: Talk about your regional art community in Corvallis, OR, and how you’ve also been able to develop a career beyond where you live?

AF: ​I moved to Corvallis in 2015 when I was hired to teach painting and core studio (foundational art) full-time at Oregon State University. I didn’t know anyone in Corvallis, but I was excited to work at an R1 institution in the beautiful Willamette Valley. Soon, I discovered there was an artist community stemming particularly from the university art department. I became fast friends with now-deceased artist Julie Green, who was internationally recognized for her work ‘The Last Supper,' which encouraged viewers to think critically about capital punishment. I met Bruce Burris, a nationally known artist and social worker, whose brilliant collage work and drawings respond to topics such as the politics of rural community centers, and local events such as the Malheur Refuge stand-off. My OSU colleagues make work that explores the inherent connection between science and art (Leah Wilson, Michael Boonstra, Andy Myers). I feel a deep kinship with my colleague John Whitten, whose work embraces familiar subjects such as cats and also the deeper mysteries of the unknown. Another Corvallis hero and art ally is Joan Truckenbrod, a pioneer of digital art, whose hand woven digital jacquard weavings are, in my opinion, treasures. Corvallis has become an unexpected home over these eleven years. I make sure to travel to cities such as New York, LA, the Bay Area, Seattle and Portland to see my friend's exhibitions. I also serve as the Curator of the OSU Art in the President’s Residence Program, which rotates annually and keeps me in-tune with work made by contemporary artists of the Pacific Northwest.

The Five
2015, acrylic and Gouache on paper, 50x40"

The Seance
2018, acrylic, gouache and colored pencil, 25x25"

S-F: ​Who are you looking at (dead or alive)?

AF: I have a small collection of art including work by Kim Dorland, Hayley Barker, Joe Rudko, Scott Malbaurn, Melody Owen, Julie Green and Holly Andres. All of these artists I consider my friends, so I am honored to be surrounded by their work in my home. My favorite artist is Charles Burchfield. I love his watercolor paintings, but even better are his numerous drawings called ‘Conventions for Abstract Thought’ which use quick, gestural penciled shapes, lines, patterns to represent specific emotions (ex. ‘Hypnotic Intensity’) and the sounds of nature (ex. ‘heatwaves, and insect sounds’) and doodles that fill sheets of scrap paper. Other artists I am indebted to include Madge Gill, Emma Kunz, Mary Sully, Hilma af Klint, Paulina Peavy, and Agatha Wojciechowsky.

In a corner of Fidler's home, featuring one of her hypnotic landscapes and a wood sculpture by Charles "Woody" Woodside.

S-F: What's next for you (residencies, shows, curatorial projects)? ​

AF: I am curating an exhibition for PRAx at OSU that will open January 9 2027 and run through March 12. It is called: ‘Charles Woodside: What the Wood Wants to Be’. Charles Raymond Woodside, known to friends as “Woody,” lived and worked for more than thirty years in Summit, Alsea, Corvallis, and Philomath, Oregon. Working subtractively, Woodside chiseled wood to reveal the hidden forms he felt were already embedded within. His sculptures take inspiration from the hamadryads of Greek mythology—female tree spirits whose lives are inseparable from the trees they inhabit. Woodside described his process as an act of “digging out,” believing he was releasing these spirits from fallen trunks and branches. Right now, I am working on an audio tour with interviews featuring local people who knew Woody. The exhibition will include over a hundred pieces and will include a reconstruction of his carving studio. We plan to have musical performances take place in the gallery in response to his work.
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​My artwork will be featured in a two-person show with Kelly McCauley in Corvallis at Living Studios opening in October. Living Studios is an art studio and gallery at Cornerstone Associates that supports neurodiverse arts in their artistic practice. The gallery is run by artists, Bruce Burris and Jill Baker.

The metaphysical and the practical living side-by-side in Anna Fidler's studio.
Corvalis, Oregon

You can see more of Anna Fidler's work:
     - on her website
​     - on her instagram account
     - at Johansson Projects in Oakland, CA

More from Anna Fidler's studio:

Storage.

Above and below: evidence of the process.

Above: A corner of the studio.
Below: communication device.

Inspiration.