When Arline Mann retired after a long tenure as a lawyer with Goldman Sachs in New York City, she had a list of things she thought she might like to do with her windfall of time. Being a detective was on the list, as were other “nutty things,” she smiles, so she decided to go crazy.
A year later, Mann was still searching for an activity that struck a chord with her.
“I tried some things, but they weren’t right for me,” she admits. “So, I looked at my list again and thought, ‘I don’t know what I want to do, so I’ll just dive into something.’”
When Mann’s eyes fell on the word “paint,” her next adventure was set in stone. Or rather, etched on paper.
Mann had dabbled in drawing and painting while growing up, but not enough for her to consider art a serious endeavor for her. So, as she took brush to canvas for the first time as a retiree, she had no significant foundation in painting, she says.
What a difference the kind and encouraging words of her instructors made.
“My first instructor said, ‘You have something there. You should keep doing this,’” Mann recalls. “I don’t know if I would have otherwise.”
Mann was her own worst critic, she says, and thinking of her early paintings still pains her, as she’s convinced they were unfit for human eyes. But the gentle reassurance of her teachers nudged her forward, and in time, she began to develop a personal style.
People who have viewed at least one of Mann’s growing collection of paintings often gasp in surprise when she tells them she’s a watercolorist.
“I thought it would be the easiest for me to get into,” Mann explains. “I’d heard all the warnings about how difficult watercolor is, and how you can’t fix mistakes, but it was very easy for me to set up in the small space I had available and it didn’t smell.”
Another benefit of watercolor? Cleaning brushes is a breeze, Mann laughs.
In time, Mann no longer considered painting to be a hobbyist’s folly and embarked on a search for a Teacher. (Not a teacher of lowercase caliber but a “Teacher” with a capital T.) Key to her development was finding a watercolor instructor who worked in the style she wanted to learn: realism.
Hence the gasps when people first view Mann’s work.
“I wanted to be a realist, not an abstract painter or an impressionist,” says Mann, who roped New York City-based artist Frederick Brosen into being her instructor. “I was interested in precision and detail, which you might think is a funny thing for a watercolorist, but I knew from looking at (Brosen’s) work that it was possible.”
It might not be surprising that a lawyer who was reinventing herself as an artist in her retirement might not be able to completely shed the mentality of a jurist. As the managing director of the Global Employment Law Group at Goldman Sachs, Mann made a living out of pouring over the finest details of the law – out of seeing the world as it had been codified.
Mann could have chosen to produce paintings made of soft daubs of pallid colors and blurry impressions of reality, but Brosen taught her how to paint the world as she saw it. And as her paintings reveal, there is sufficient beauty and depth in how she sees things to make her paintings perfectly fit for human eyes.
“Her watercolors contemplate light and shadow in personal spaces and on cherished objects,” writes the New Orleans-based LeMieux Galleries in her website biography. “Her work seeks clarity, calm and joy, and projects a benevolent world. In Mann’s watercolors, light often stresses the beauty and comfort of a distinctive room or familiar objects such as glass, books and soap – always with a sense of human presence.”
This brief sketch of Mann’s work is evident in her paintings. In one, she captures the moment a late afternoon sun casts one side of a room in a house in golden radiance, the soft light filtering through the small square panes of an unseen window to touch the back of an armchair, the shade of a lamp, and a bird perched in a painting on the wall. Mann did more than capture the colors, shapes and shadows of the moment; she also rendered its warmth – the quiet resonance of day yielding to evening.
It’s as if Mann was intimately familiar with the space.
Elder House
Not long after Mann took up painting in 2013, she and her husband began searching for a second home outside of New York City. She says they wanted an escape from the Big Apple – a place where they knew no one and where no one knew them.
Images of North Carolina failed to capture their interest. “It looked like a place where people were tired,” Mann recalls, “and we’re not tired.”
For reasons that remain buried in the moment, if not her memory, Mann crossed over to the Tennessee side of the Great Smoky Mountains and resumed her search. When a photo of Elder House materialized on her screen, their quest was over.
Elder House is a century-old home on Elder Mountain, a lesser elevation between Lookout and Signal mountains in Chattanooga. Built by George Elder in the early 1920s, it was the first structure built on the mountain since the removal of the Cherokee population in the 1840s, notes a flyer for an upcoming exhibition of Mann’s paintings at Customs House Museum in Clarksville.
Despite the age of the house, Mann and her husband are only its fourth set of owners, and thus the fourth set of caretakers of its spacious interior, grand exterior, lush landscaping and stone water tower – an architectural curiosity that begs comparisons to a castle. They’re also the fourth set of residents to enjoy the property’s unfettered view of Chattanooga, as well as the hills and valleys that stretch out from the city to the distant horizon.
“We said, ‘This is crazy; we’ve never spent any time in Tennessee,’” Mann recalls. “And then a couple of days later, we said, ‘Maybe we should see the house.’ It’s very welcoming. It’s survived for a reason.”
Despite the staggering sprawl of beauty visible from the patio and backyard of Elder House, Mann has painted mostly interior scenes. In “Shelter” (2020), she brings to life a cozy corner in a family room occupied by an armchair, an ottoman, an end table and a lamp. Two windows border the setting, allowing the viewer to picture Mann reading a book or simply reclining during different seasons and times of day.
“Peace of Place” (2021) takes art buffs deeper into Elder Home, where three slices of sunlight cut across a blue nightgown that’s hanging on a hook in her bathroom.
The finer details in both paintings are mystifying. Somehow, the body of the lamp in “Shelter” reflects a distorted image of the surrounding room, while the wrinkles and folds of the garment in “Peace of Place” defy the abstractions used in other kinds of watercolors.
Mann says people often mistake her watercolors for oil paintings when they first set eyes on them.
“The thing that contributes the most to their impression is a very detailed underdrawing in graphite. However, I hope my work still has the element of transparency I think is so pretty in other people’s paintings.”
Mann did venture outside to paint the stone archway that framed her and her husband during their wedding. They built the archway for the ceremony, during which it was draped with flowers and greenery and lit with a splash of sunshine.
Her recreation of the archway, however, evokes the tableau of a misty morning, with the stone path that crosses under the archway leading into woods rather than outdoor seating. Although Mann’s paintings are based in realism, she leaves room for the viewer’s imagination to wander.
As one views Mann’s paintings and comes to a sense of her skills, it can be difficult to accept that there was a time when she declined to call herself a painter.
“For the longest time, when someone asked me what I was doing, I’d say, ‘I’m painting,’ or ‘I’m a painting student,’” Mann says. “I hesitated to say, ‘I’m a painter.’ I didn’t know how to judge my own work. Some artists have an overblown view of what they are. I wanted to shy away from that.’”
As Mann matured as a painter, Elder House was a constant companion in her development. Whenever she and her husband were residing in the house, the way the sun was illuminating a corner would stop her in her tracks, or her view from a spot in a room would inspire a sketch, or she’d think the array of book spines on a shelf would challenge her abilities – and she’d begin to paint.
“I believe most people who paint are always thinking about what might make a good project. There’s the compositional side of it: What has balance? What has interesting forms? And I’m always interested in colors and hues and the way something looks. I’ll catch myself thinking, ‘I love how I feel when I look at this spot. I wonder if I could communicate that in a painting?’ I’m always on the lookout.”
Mann’s process within Elder Home allowed her to build a collection of paintings over time. She says this was crucial to her advancement as an artist.
“It’s helpful as a painter to do a series of things. You learn something from every piece you do and can then apply it to the next piece. So, doing a series of paintings of this house was important to me.”
Mann might have been slow to consider herself a painter, but art galleries in New York City, Chattanooga and beyond, as well as art aficionados worldwide, are embracing her work. In addition to being selected for more than 35 competitive group exhibitions in NYC and elsewhere, Mann enjoyed a stretch in the local spotlight when the Association for Visual Arts in Chattanooga granted her a solo exhibition in 2019. Mann’s work also has won numerous water media awards and been featured in several art magazines.
Mann’s next solo exhibition will open at Customs House this August and will feature 14 works. Local fans who wish to see the paintings will have through October to make the trip.
For now, Mann has another list to contemplate – and it doesn’t include being a detective. Rather, she has a list of the things she wants to paint at Elder House.
“I’m working on my first big landscape. It’s the view from my bathroom window as I stand on a chair,” Mann announces. “Then there’s a room at the end of the house – the original bedroom of George and Hazel Elder. I might want to paint that. And there’s a little bird house I might want to paint. So, I have a list. We’ll see where it takes me.”