I work very hard at what I do, and think of myself as a poster child for the new retirement.
Arline Mann spends only about a third of her time in Chattanooga, but she’s certainly making her mark.
The retired New York City lawyer, who took up watercolor painting in earnest about five years ago, earned a solo exhibition at the AVA Gallery after scoring a Best in Show win in the Association for Visual Arts’ 2018 Juried Members Show in September. Her collection of 25 paintings, titled “Tender Layers,” will be on view at AVA through June 14.
She recently spoke via email with the Times Free Press about taking up painting, her creative process and how Chattanooga is making an impression on her. The conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: To what do you attribute your Best in Show win?
A: I could not say what appealed to the jurors, but I would hope it was a combination of technical skill and the content and mood of the paintings. I would describe the paintings as quiet and introspective, but happy.
Q: What is your painting process like? Do you work on one painting at a time or in multiples?
A: I do often work on two paintings at once, because it is often important with watercolor to allow a layer of paint to dry before taking the next step, and it’s tempting to go in too quickly unless you have something to do while paint is drying! I am a slow worker, plus the style in which I paint requires a detailed underdrawing in graphite. The largest of my paintings in the exhibit took several months to complete from the time I began the drawing until the moment I slapped my hand down and told myself I was finished.
Q: How did your art career begin?
A: I’m from the Northeast, and I had a long career as a lawyer in New York City. For 25 years, I was in charge of the global Employment Law Group at Goldman Sachs, where I was a managing director. When I retired in 2012 (at age 63; I’m now 70), I knew that I had done all I wanted as a lawyer, but I also expected I would have decades of decent health. (My father died at 95, and my mother is in excellent health at 99.) I wanted to focus, learn and progress in some area, and that turned out to be painting. I had never seriously done any drawing or painting, but I had always been very interested in looking at art. I knew as soon as I began to take art classes that that would be it for me, and I got really serious when I started to study at The Art Students League in New York about five years ago. I have a super teacher named Rick Brosen. I work very hard at what I do, and think of myself as a poster child for the new retirement. I’ve had quite a few paintings selected for juried shows in New York City, but this is my first solo show.
Q: How did you land in Chattanooga?
A: About five years ago, my partner, Bob Katz, and I decided that we’d like to have a home outside of New York City, but not in any of the locations New Yorkers often choose (upstate New York, Connecticut, Florida). We wanted to be in the East, where Bob’s children and grandchildren are, and I had vacationed quite a bit in the Smokies. It took about 10 minutes on Google before a photo popped up of the house we live in on Elder Mountain. We never looked at another house.
Q: What have you discovered about your new city?
A: It is clear that Chattanooga was always a lovely town, and we keep learning wonderful things that set the South apart. It has been so easy to make friends here. And since we go back and forth between Chattanooga and New York City, we also notice the changes that occur in Chattanooga every time we return. We see a very wide array of people from lots of different places living and moving into Chattanooga (we know several, for example, who live part-time in, or travel constantly to, New York City, like us), and partly because of the diversity of young and, shall we say, more mature Southerners and Northerners from all over, I suppose, the town seems to get more and more sophisticated every visit. … We actually got a much, much more lively town than us ignorant Northerners knew to expect. There’s nothing insular about Chattanooga, and we love it.
Contact Lisa Denton at ldenton@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6281.