Anne Marie McNamara was raised in Tacoma, Washington. She moved to Seattle to attend University of Washington in 1973 and has stayed there. Her artistic mentor was Steve Fuller, Professor Emeritus at UW. She studied Sumi and watercolor with Fumiko Kimura. She is mostly self-taught.
Anne’s medium is watercolor, but she often adds other media. One day, painting in La Conner, the wind tossed sand on her painting. Upon her request people bought sand from all over the world. She now also uses glass frits, sea glass, Dichroic glass, alpaca fur, cedar, palm and birch and other materials to make her art.
In thinking about her work, she travels back in memory to when she was a toddler. One day she found her baby book and decided a pink crayon mark on the first page was a wonderful addition. Her mother, not believing in hitting children, spanked her. The shock of her mother hitting her froze that memory in time. Years later, when she had her own toddler, Anne’s mother gave her the baby book. As she opened the book, she saw the pink crayon mark. She remembered when she added the pink color it became one with the white background, not two separate colors. Now, after years of school, she saw the two different features of this page: a pink crayon line on a simple white page of the book. This theme permeates all her art work, even her representational works.
Anne Marie has developed a style and framing technique to hang her work in a way that allows people to view the art in different ways by turning the art piece. This style of art is now called Turn Art™.
Another aspect of her creative life is providing Energetic Space Clearing to change energy in troubled properties including using Feng Shui techniques. She has written a book called Earth Whisperer, The White Chick from Tacoma. It was her way of stating that energetic intuitive people are all around us and does not have to be some esoteric exotic path of knowing.
Mostly her work is meditative and reflective. Sometimes it is not and reflects trouble in our world. It is the notion people need this to understand the emotionally impact and our choices.