There has never been a time when Anne Smith hasn't been fascinated by the world of painting. She grew up surrounded by portraits painted by her grandmother, Edith Osborne Stahl, who had studied with Robert Henri around 1915. Then there was the tortuous grand tour of Europe as a 7-year-old, remembered as two or three art museums a day, which gave her an artistic vocabulary. Upon her grandmother's death Anne received her first tools of the trade: her grandmother's palette, brushes, and oil paints. Particularly memorable was the summer art course in 1961 with Richard Martinez where she made her first experiments in this medium. Then in the mid-80's she finally admitted to herself that she had always wanted to draw and paint people and signed up for an evening course in life drawing given by Barbara Birrer-Schneider at the Schule für Form und Farbe in Zurich. She attended this class for three years, ending up specializing in ink drawings.

In 1992, starting from her study of the relationship between thinking and movement (also known as the Alexander Technique), she began to investigate in painting how the body, or parts thereof, can be used to express ideas and emotions. Of particular value in this regard was the anatomy class with Dr. Donald Weed where her observation of the connection between physical structure and movement began being trained. Her paintings, while they almost always have a figurative basis, often take a turn to the surreal or the whimsical, many times leaving questions unresolved.