Anne studied art in undergraduate school at Beaver College (now Arcadia University), Glenside, PA, where she earned a BFA in 1969, and where she specialized in painting and drawing.
 

VISUAL ART

Anne earned an MFA in painting and printmaking at Tyler School of Art in 1971. Anne worked in several media throughout her career, teaching herself to work in many. For much of her successful painting career in the 1970s and 1980s, she produced large abstract canvas paintings and some paper pieces. Her largest painting was 9 feet by 15 feet that required 3 separate stretchers (frames) bolted together. The norm or median size for a painting was about 4 by 4 feet. The 6 foot by 9 foot painting below hangs in our Sedona living room. She had numerous one person shows in Atlanta, Winter Park (FL), Houston, and Minneapolis. Over 150 of her paintings hang in public, corporate, and private collections. The median size of her paintings was about 4 feet by 4 feet. 

Anne developed a painting technique with her main tool being a Wagner power spray painter. Among the many things about Anne that surprised me, this one "blew my mind," an artist using a tool of the construction trades. She used acrylic paints, because they had less lingering odor and dried much more quickly than oils.  The canvas or paper was laid flat on the floor. She would first apply a base color or two using water color. After that paint dried, Anne would mask portions of the work with crumpled newspaper, shredded paper, confetti, wire, and sometimes cut pieces of paper; and spray a chosen light acrylic color. After that dried while she played with Brown Bear or did some chores, she would move things around on the surface and spray a darker color. This went on for many color iterations. Her studio space was about 20 by 40 feet, so she had room to work on several pieces simultaneously. Usually a spatula of oil or two of oil paint would be smeared on a nearly finished work. She used colored pencil to finish the borders between colors. 

After teaching a young man whom we sponsored to work with paper mache’, Anne herself adopted the technique to produce 3 series of sculptural masks in the 1990s. One series featured Native American shamans, a second was based on several Jimmy Buffet songs and their characters, such as Miranda. A third series was space creatures.

In the 2000s, Anne took ceramics courses at Edison Community College and made numerous ceramic vessels and flowers.

In the 2010s, Anne created small representational lake and landscapes based on scenes in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, using cut birch bark to create montain ridges in the background, and found twigs, moss, tree boughs as vegetation. She had 2 individual shows in 2015 and 2017, and participated in 2 group shows. Video tours of the individual shows can be found on YouTube by searching Anne Vaccaro lake scapes, and Anne Vaccaro lake scapes 2017. As shown below, Anne applied bark and twigs to “rusticate” the kitchen cabinet doors and other furniture of our Blue Mountain Lake house.

Anne also did stone masonry. The photograph below shows the fireplace chimney and hearth for which she laid the stone. The larger stones in the chimney were cultured and flat on the back. Most of the smaller stones in the chimney, and all of the stones in the hearth were natural, 3-dimensional stones harvested from our property.