Anya McManis is a mixed media artist and painter whose work explores the marks left by time and the quiet ways memory and landscape become intertwined. Drawn to horizons, layers, and traces, she builds her paintings through layered surfaces and quiet, repeated marks that echo the rhythms of weathered stone and open landscapes. Rather than depicting specific places, her work reflects remembered landscapes—filtered through experience and an ongoing fascination with how time shapes the world around us.

Her current series, Shaped by Time, is painted in acrylic on canvas, and was born from years of traveling through the Southwestern landscapes surrounding her home in Colorado—New Mexico, Arizona, Utah—and a fascination, sharpened by growing up in Germany, with a terrain unlike anything she’d known before: rugged red rock formations and vast open skies.

McManis’s path to art was anything but linear. Raised in Germany and drawn to painting as a child, she instead built a career in translation, travel, and later graphic design after moving to the United States. A chance encounter with a painting in a Denver gallery in the early 2000s changed everything—she bought supplies the next day and has been painting ever since.

McManis has had seven solo exhibitions at the University of Denver from 2011 to 2019, and has shown her work in numerous galleries, including the Artwork Network Gallery and Niza Knoll Gallery in Denver’s Santa Fe Arts District. She has also participated in group shows including the Florence Biennale in Italy and the Niagara Falls History Museum in Canada, and continues to show regularly at juried art festivals throughout Colorado.