Newport has some great art lined up

The Oregon Coast Council for the Arts welcomes Corvallis-based artist Anna Fidler from April 10 to May 29 at the Newport Visual Arts Center.

Fidler’s exhibition, “Incessant Pulse of the Future,” includes large-scale geometric works on paper. The new exhibit is being presented in conjunction with the Charles A. Hartman Fine Art gallery in Portland.

The show will feature pieces from Fidler’s most recent series, “Quit the Night, Seek the Day,” a new direction for the accomplished artist.

“My paintings have become bold, geometric and opaque,” Fidler said. “These non-objective works are painted spells — incantations that describe feelings such as anxiousness, euphoria and yearning. To resist objectification, I have abandoned traditional modes of seeing and encourage my viewers to do so as well. My new works abandon the human form in favor of representing energy itself.”

Fidler’s works are made with flashe — a water-soluble vinyl paint — gouache and ink on sheets of handmade grid paper. Cut-out stencils, invented symbols penned in ink and flat matte repeated and mirrored forms work together to create the sense of energy that the artist describes.

Fidler received an MFA from Portland State University in 2005 and BFA from Western Michigan University in 1995. Since 2015, she has been a full-time core studio instructor of drawing and painting, and the JumpstART pre-college program coordinator at OSU. Previously she taught design and painting at the Oregon College of Art and Craft. She has had solo exhibitions at The Boise Art Museum, APEX at The Portland Art Museum, Johansson Project in Oakland and Wieden & Kennedy and Disjecta in Portland. In 2020, she was commissioned to create a work for “Metamorphosis: Visualizing the Music of Paul Hindemith,” at The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Eugene.

The Upstairs Gallery is currently open from noon to 4 pm, Wednesdays and Saturdays, at the Newport Visual Arts Center, 777 NW Beach Drive.

For more information, go to coastarts.org.