Mary Anne Carley is a Sharon, Connecticut watercolor artist and has been painting most of her life. She remembers painting murals of Mexico in her fourth grade Social Studies class and winning the best drawing of a camera in a camera drawing contest while in the Girl Scouts in Armonk, New York where she grew up.

Her art education formally began in the 7th grade at St. Mary's Hall in Burlington, New Jersey and continued on during her high school years at the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, New York. She studied Fine Arts at Skidmore College, graduated with a BS Degree from the Hartford School of Art and received a MS Degree from Central Connecticut College in Art and Education. She also taught art for many years at the Litchfield Junior High School in Litchfield, Connecticut.

Within the past 15 years Mary Anne has painted exclusively with watercolors. By tradition, watercolor artists paint on firm watercolor paper. Mary Anne is a non-traditional watercolor artist  She mostly paints quickly on thin rice paper with brilliant colors, while sitting outside on the grass either at her home in Sharon or at nearby local areas.

Mary Anne's focus is to capture the mood, movement and color of what she is seeing. Some of the paintings are first drawn first with watercolor pens; the shapes are then painted in with glittery watercolor paint, right up to the lines, which is just like coloring in coloring book pages, she explains. She loves to watch the lines run when the paint touches them. Sometimes Mary Anne takes her work home to dry, and then she draws over the top of the painting with permanent ink to further define the shapes.  And sometimes she draws on one piece of paper, paints on another and combines the two pieces into one work.