The painting tradition is strong in Anne Packard's family from grandfather, Max Bohm, turn of the century Impressionist, to her grandmother, great aunt, uncle, mother, and daughters. Packard studied at Bard College and with Philip Malicoat of Provincetown.

Anne took up painting at 30, when the youngest of her five children was 6 months old. At that point, she and her family summered in Provincetown, where her grandfather, painter Max Bohm, had lived toward the end of his life and made his lyrical sea scapes. In the '70s, Anne divorced and moved to Provincetown to live there full time.
" I used to hang my paintings outside my house, the small paintings, and try to catch what traffic I could. I'd sell them for $15 or $20, then $50 and $75," Anne recalls.
One day, Provincetown artist Robert Motherwell wandered past. "He bought four of them and came back four or five days later, and he bought more." Anne says. "I didn't know who he was. Then one day I saw him on the street and asked someone. `That's Motherwell,' they said." The two artists became friends, and when Anne moved to Provincetown, Motherwell let her stay in his house.

She doesn't paint sunshine but likes skies with turbulent clouds. Her paintings have tremendous power, and she portrays the strength of nature in the windswept dunes, the force of the quiet seas, the light striking through the storm clouds, the intensity of night coming across the water. There is a quality in those paintings that draws the viewer in to wonder a little, to contemplate the viewpoint. Packard says that she wants the viewer to see whatever he or she wants to see in them.

The expanse of sky above Provincetown's hooked harbor is as grand as a western sky above the pains, so it is no wonder that the woman who has painted that watery horizon with a fluid skill, over and over again, no wonder she has won much attention for her work.


'It's more of an atmosphere that I like to capture,' Packard says. 'I do paintings that are alone, not lonely, thatgood kind of aloneness.'