Anne Barney

Anne Barney is a pastel and white-line woodcut (WLWC) artist and poet with four published chapbooks who moved from Rehoboth Beach, DE to Martinsburg, WV in October 2025. A poet from the time she was a little girl, she received her first recognition with an Honorable Mention from Jack and Jill Magazine at age nine. She did not begin painting until 2016 when she was living in Great Cacapon, WV. To counter a severe writer’s block, she started studying oil pastels with a local artist. Having never done visual art before, she found it very liberating to express her creativity in a completely different format. In 2017, she moved to Rehoboth Beach where she continued to take lessons and switched to soft pastels. Her pastel paintings are primarily from photographs she takes while hiking in National, regional, and state parks, particularly landscapes that can be seen only on foot.

While still in Delaware, she joined the Delaware White-Line Woodcut Guild in 2021 where she learned the artform of white-line woodcuts, a marriage of woodcarving and watercolor painting. This uniquely American artform was developed in the early 20th century by a group of artists, most of whom were women, who spent summers in the Provincetown, Massachusetts art colony.

In WLWC, artists carve an entire image on a single woodblock, unlike other forms of woodcuts where a block is needed for each color. They separate the parts of the image with carved lines of varying width. With watercolors, they paint each section and press the paper onto the block to transfer the image. The block can be re-used to create different versions of the print.

Anne and her musician husband Steve Van Order love to hike, support live jazz and classical music performances, and are big fans of Maryland-based professional and college sports teams. And they also root for their new “home team” of Shepherd University and look forward to going the Rams women’s hoops games.