Biography Ann is an award winning artist who focuses mainly on landscapes, but enjoys still life and figurative work as well. She has "played" with art all her life but began to take it seriously after her children were grown and on their own. She considers herself mostly self taught, though she did a short stint at the Art Students League in New York. She also credits her sister, Charlotte Abernathy, an accomplished artist from Ashland, Oregon, with teaching her and encouraging her. She works in several media, but mainly in oils.
She spent her childhood years in Pittsburgh, PA where she spent her idle hours coloring with her crayons or creating puppets or paper dolls. She was the happiest when she was outside, no matter what the activity. The landscape was what fascinated her, even at an early age, and she would draw and color at every opportunity.
Her family moved to Birmingham, AL when she was 14, and she has been in the south ever since. She attended college at the University of Alabama, though she did not study art. She and her husband married after graduation and have raised three children. They have lived in Tuscaloosa, AL, Birmingham, and then Memphis, TN, and have now retired to Paris, TN, near the beautiful Land Between the Lakes area of northwest TN. She was never far from art in various forms, but when they retired the call of the paint brush was too strong to ignore, and she took it seriously.
She paints" en plein air" (in the open air) as much as possible, and the lake area provides much subject matter. Besides that she and her husband love to travel and she usually has her paint supplies in hand!
She has served on the Paris/Henry County Arts Council and is Past President of the Tennessee River Fine Arts League. She maintains studios both in her home and at the Lee Academy for the Arts in Paris, TN.