Ann Holsberry

Ann Holsberry grew up on the Gulf Coast of Florida, where she was strongly influenced by the culture of New Orleans. After finishing high school, she journeyed northward, receiving a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College and a Masters Degree studying design and urbanization systems at Cornell University. In response to the idealistic spirit of the times, she also earned a law degree, studying at Cornell and U.C. Berkeley (Boalt Hall). She continued to paint as she practiced law for twelve years in the San Francisco Bay Area, raising her son as a single mother during part of that time.

She eventually left the practice of law to devote time to painting and to the healing arts, including exploration of the body-mind connection, meditation, and using painting as a guide to the unconscious. From a desire to explore the transformative power of art, she began painting for process rather than the result, studying with the Painting Experience in San Francisco. She also worked as a Rosen Method Bodywork Practitioner and Movement teacher. She taught Rosen Movement in the U.S., Canada, and Europe and conducted classes in Painting Process and Movement.

In 2007, after fifteen years of exploring this process-driven approach, she began exhibiting and selling her paintings again. In this most recent phase of her work, she moves between abstraction and representation, often finding inspiration in nature. For the past two decades she has spent part of each year living and working in France, where she finds inspiration in the rich cultural history of Europe. Fittingly, much of her recent work is an examination of the migratory patterns of people and animals as they travel around the globe.