Constance Edith Fowler

Constance Edith Fowler (1907–1996) was an American artist known as a painter and printmaker, an author, and an educator who taught at Willamette University and Albion College.

Early life and education Constance Edith Fowler was born June 2, 1907, in International Falls, Minnesota. She was the daughter of immigrants George Fowler, a butcher from England, and Matilda Einfeld (Braaker) Fowler, from Hamburg. She earned an A.B. at Washington State College in 1929, studying with the painter William McDermitt. She also studied for three terms at the University of Washington

Career In Salem during the depression, she gave art lessons for a dollar per session, and volunteered to run an art club for Willamette University students. She taught art at Willamette University from 1935 to 1947, and from 1949 to 1956, she taught summer classes at Central Washington State and Bayview Summer College in Michigan. After a stroke in 1993, she lived in Milwaukie, Oregon, with her sister, and then went to a nursing home in Oregon City. She died in 1996.

Biographer Roger Hull has said of Fowler's move to Michigan, "Leaving Oregon in 1947 was a major step at a crucial moment in the cultural history of the United States, with World War II at an end and younger artists questioning the values of American Regionalism and realism."

Commenting in 1957, that "Her recent work, now on display at the Bush Museum, will no doubt surprise many of these admirers, both for the new aesthetic approaches and the new concepts that motivate this work", Carl Hall explored differences in her later works that are "very contemporary in her concern for the abstract consequence", with "this atomic age the great impersonal forces at work in the universe have to be taken into account" and the "human frailty with which we confront them". Hall continued,

Hence this new work while still very spirited in concept and execution is different from the more intimate work of former years... Much of it is common to the modern movement in art, even to the symbolical forms she makes use of, but in certain works something distinctive is said that haunts one's imagination. — Carl Hall

Selected exhibitions Fowler's works are held in the permanent collections of Portland Art Museum, Willamette University, and Washington State University Library. Carnegie grants, summers, 1936 through 1938 Willamette University award, 1991