Anna Forrest Fischler wades into the pristine waters of Cayo Costa State Park, an undeveloped island north of Captiva Island, accessible only by boat or kayak. It’s a warm summer day in 2023, and the Fort Myers native is painting ‘en plein air,’ or outside, to capture the views of a setting she knows well. The remote alcove was a favorite for family excursions as she was growing up.
Anna set up her easel on the nearby shore, but she has forgotten an essential tool: water—the substance that will turn her dry palette into a fluid alchemy of color. Fortunately, an aquatic expanse surrounds her. Out of necessity and curiosity, Anna dips a small porcelain bowl into the shallows and gets to work. The salty Gulf water works just fine to mix her gouache, a water-based paint with a richer pigmentation than watercolors. The resulting works exude a distinct sense of place, with Anna’s impressionist style and native lens accented by occasional speckles of sand from the shore.
Anna spent last summer painting plein air scenes of familiar, wild locales across her native Southwest Florida.
Now a senior illustration major at the Rhode Island School of Design, Anna spent last summer at home making lively, loose landscape paintings of Southwest Florida. In the familiar cradle of home, the artist was free to investigate. How does salt water compare to what’s dipped out of a creek? What will this painting look like if it is sliced to ribbons and reassembled? In several pieces of the Summer ‘23 Plein Airs series, Anna cut her paintings into geometric patterns and rearranged them like puzzle pieces. The illusory effect makes you feel as if you’re looking through a latticed window at the landscape beyond. The works—inspired by Anna’s textile coursework—take on a tile-like appearance similar to quilting patterns. “It’s nerve-wracking but healthy,” Anna says of taking a knife to her art. “You can’t be attached to your work, because if you’re satisfied, you stop.”
Though plein air painting abounds in subtropical Southwest Florida, Anna eschews the ubiquitous beachy scenes portrayed by hobbyist snowbirds. Instead, she prefers raw, untouched locales like Cayo Costa, settings rife with natural beauty and personal significance.
Unfazed by her hometown’s heat and humidity, Anna spent her days capturing landmarks like the Sanibel Lighthouse, desolate after Hurricane Ian and shrouded in a tangle of sea oats and cordgrass. The banyan tree that magisterially graces the grounds of the Edison and Ford Winter Estates stands proud amid a patchwork of triangular cuts that seem to radiate from the tree’s trunk, roots and branches. When Anna, a former cross-country runner, decided to capture her John Yarbrough Linear Park training grounds, she found previously overlooked charm in the green space situated between the train tracks and a drainage ditch. “There were a ton of lily pads I didn’t see when I was running,” she says. Rich royal blues, warm magentas and pops of yellow saturate the resulting painting, Linear Park, which hung among many of Anna’s works in a recent solo exhibition at the Arts for ACT Gallery in Downtown Fort Myers.
Anna uses a panoply of materials that dissolve in water: acrylics, fountain pen inks, gouache and water-soluble wax pastels, to name a few. The quick-drying materials serve a plein air environment well; they’re ideal for layering and refining detail while maintaining the soft, loose strokes that characterize Anna’s landscapes. Recently, she added watercolor pencils to her repertoire. “The pencils are from the 1960s,” Anna says happily of her thrift store find. On an excursion to Cullum’s Trail Park in Bonita Springs, the artist struggled to capture the finer details within the reflections on the water. The thin watercolor pencil lines, added later from home, allowed her to add depth to the creek’s rippling surface.
Anna uses the natural water at her plein air sites to mix her paints. Salty seawater from Cayo Costa, fresh swamp water from Six Mile Cypress Slough Preserve and water from a drainage ditch at Linear Park help the 21-year-old artist reinforce the connection between the paintings and their subjects.
Since her trip to Cayo Costa, Anna hasn’t bothered bringing water to mix paints and clean brushes when she paints in the wild. What began as a pragmatic solution became an intentional practice—adding another layer of physical connection between the art and the subject. “Some of [my pieces] have bits of sand stuck in the paint, or [I used darker colors] to compensate for how bright the light was,” Anna says.
Each piece takes a couple of hours to complete. Last summer, she produced a substantial 20 works—about two paintings a week. Anna doesn’t usually scout her locations ahead of time, but she knows which hometown haunts hold compositional promise. “Conditions can be unknown,” she says. “I got chased out by horseflies at the Estero Bay Preserve."
To make it easier to relocate and trek to dreamy, remote locales, her setup is light and clever: She paints on watercolor paper taped to drawing boards rather than bulky canvases, uses a portable easel that she’s modified for quick setup and breakdown, and dons a bucket hat from Fort Myers staple Sun Harvest Citrus to protect from UV rays.
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She paints on watercolor paper taped to drawing boards rather than bulky canvases, uses a portable easel that she’s modified for quick setup and breakdown, and dons a bucket hat from Fort Myers staple Sun Harvest Citrus to protect from UV rays.
Anna layers on color quickly and decisively. Once the painting dries, she sketches angular patterns on the backs of the paper, cuts out the shapes with an X-Acto knife and rearranges the scene to her liking. The experimental artist then glues each piece of her fractured landscapes onto thick Bristol paper and piles heavy books and notepads on top to flatten the piece. Anna is fascinated by how the sharp cuts interact with the soft, round figures in her paintings, elegantly interrupting the flora and fauna’s subtle forms and adding a surreal edge to her landscape work.
Currently, Anna’s studying abroad in Rome, lugging her art supplies through the Eternal City’s ancient, labyrinthine streets. Her plein air paintings keep her connected to the places and memories of her hometown, thousands of miles away. She thinks back to the hours spent last summer, rediscovering Southwest Florida, paying close attention to the treasures and subtleties she previously drove or walked right by. “I [was] keeping my eyes open for compositional possibilities and the eccentricities of my town that I had gone blind to with time,” she says. “Painting en plein air forced me to slow down—to be observant and grateful.”
Photography by Christina Bankson