Maine Artist and Author

Doris Anne Holman, a professional Maine artist and author for over 35 years ( and mother of four children), spent 38 years balancing her art with a career as an elementary and middle school teacher (27 years teaching in Monmouth, Main). Her teaching career also spans teaching every level of art for almost as long, but it is important to start at the beginning of her illustrious art career as artist, author and teacher with her inconspicuous upbringing in art.

Doris Anne painted in Maine for 30 years summer and winter. However, now she has moved to Florida for the winter where she paints numerous herons and other Florida birds. She also paints the pictures for her Florida books in her studio. She teaches about the endangered Florida habitat through her books and slides. She hired a guide to take her by canoe down the Hillsborough River to enable her to get photos to use for her illustrations.

Doris Anne has painted in all mediums but prefers watercolor. Today she uses watercolor mixed with gesso and ink to create large paintings of herons in the wild. She has studied at the Portland College of Art, and with reknown artist Valfred Thelin, Robert E. Wood, Milford Zornes, and Edgar A. Whitney. (In NYC as well as Maine, where she was joined by artists including Leo Brooks and Jim Ford in the art group called "The Thirty Artists".

Doris Anne earned a master's degree in reading from Loyola College in Baltimore and taught reading and primary grades for a large part of her 38 year professional teaching career. She spent years teaching children in after-school art programs. She taught Winthrop adult education for ten years and even taught evening programs at the University of Maine for eleven years. Her last nine years of teaching art was athe Monmouth Middle Schools. She also taught at the University of Maine in Bath-Brunswick, as well as workshops all over the country: Florida, Monhegan Island and coastal Maine, Bermuda and Canada.