ITTING
IN HER STUDIO, once a bedroom in her Holyoke duplex condominium, Judith Mann
'73G was describing the raptures of taking flight to parts unknown.
Make that Flight, with a capital F: the elegant name of
the thirty-two-foot sloop that Mann and her husband, Peter LaBoria,
call home for months at a time. An associate professor of art
at Hampshire
College in Amherst, Mann was preparing, when we spoke late
last spring, to embark on a sabbatical year spent sailing the
sibling seas of the Mediterranean while making paintings in the
fluent medium of watercolor. In May, after turning in her student
evaluations, she boarded a plane to Istanbul. From there, it
was down to the Sea of Marmara to join LaBoria, also an artist,
and their eight-year-old tortoiseshell cat, Saphie.
And from there? Forty-eight hours before departure
time, she didn't know where they were headed, and didn't seem
concerned. "There's nothing I love more than to be on a
three-hour night watch, dressed in layers of clothing, wearing
a Walkman with headphones," Mann said. "If I could
play an instrument, there are pieces I could play by heart, I've
listened to them so many times. I watch the stars and never notice
the passage of time."
Turning fifty this year, Mann has come a long
way from the little, landlocked farming town in upstate New York
where she grew up. She earned her BFA close to home, at SUNY
Buffalo, then taught junior high school. Friends and colleagues
were skeptical about her decision to pursue an MFA, but two weeks
after she finished hers at UMass in 1973, Mann had two job offers.
And soon after she accepted one of them, from the Nova Scotia
College of Art and Design in Halifax, she and LaBoria discovered
sailing. They bought Flight in 1975, and "sailed
whenever we could," up and down the Atlantic coast, during
their years in Canada.
"I jumped into it with both feet; I became
compulsive about it," Mann recalls. In 1991, after she'd
begun teaching at Hampshire, the couple set out to cross the
Atlantic, only to turn back a thousand miles into the trip, when
bad weather, equipment failures, and seasickness made her lose
heart. Much to Peter's chagrin, Judith was convinced she'd never
try that again, but three years later, she looked up from
her newspaper one morning and said, "Let's do it."
He didn't even ask what, she says. He just started getting ready.
And the second time around, in the eighteen days after Bermuda
slipped below the western horizon and before the Azores appeared
in the East, they never even put up the storm sails.
Perhaps
because Mann had overcome one daunting challenge, she went on to tackle a
second: learning to paint with watercolors. Oils, her medium of choice since
college, are impractical for life on a boat. Watercolors are a portable, though
far less forgiving, form. "It's so hard, so awful," Mann says. "I
never would have learned it any other way."
Her way was to set up a studio of sorts in
an old, deserted, roofless stone dwelling perched on a Spanish
cliff, and copy reproductions of watercolors by the nineteenth-century
American master of the medium, Winslow Homer. Mann is a firm
believer in the merits of copying a traditional, albeit no longer
fashionable, method of studying technique that she encourages
her students to use. The approach paid off for her; she speaks
confidently about "the nitpicking craft" of watercolor,
about creating "the illusion of immediacy" with its
effects. Still, it was a painstaking, protracted, and often frustrating
business.
"In three years, I made twenty copies,"
Mann says wryly. Much of what she painted didn't measure up to
her own standards, but by now, she says, "I finally like
describing things with watercolors."
The vibrant, richly hued watercolors on exhibit at the Holyoke
Public Library last spring displayed both technical capability
and Mann's attraction to the dramatic beauty of the Mediterranean
world. She chose this venue for her work in hopes that visitors
would feel the connection between the handsome Classical Revival
library building and the ancient classical forms that figure
in many of the paintings. "Light and color and place,"
she says. "That's what the paintings are about."
And what light, what colors, what places!
Not "naturally drawn to history," Mann was not quite
prepared for the overwhelming effect that ancient ruins prehistoric,
Greek, Roman would have on her. And their beauty, their mystery,
their sheer emotional weight were matched in the painter's eyes
by the natural marvels of the coasts of Spain, Greece, and Italy.
She describes one of them: "In Sicily, we sailed into a
harbor in the moonlight, we could see boats anchored, we could
smell the sulfur from a nearby volcano. We sailed right up to
the beach, and Peter took a reading: fifteen feet. He threw over
the anchor it just kept going. A few feet from shore, the water
depth was one hundred and fifteen feet."
Intelligent, intensely thoughtful, Mann retains
something of the quality of the small-town-girl-at-heart. "I
used to be so resentful of people who traveled," she admits
good-naturedly. She mimics them, rolling her eyes: "`Oh,
Italy!'" Now, she says, "I couldn't live if I couldn't
travel." Especially on Flight: fully fitted out with
such luxurious necessities as books, music, a cat, "the
boat is home," she explains. "Whether it's for a month
or two days, it's my nest."
If her friends were curious, last spring, about how far Mann
might be going, so was she, and not just in terms of nautical
miles. For more than twenty years, her paintings have been mostly
of one subject: windows. Motivated by a desire to extract "the
poetics out of daily experience," she has returned to the
motif again and again, exploring the qualities and possibilities
of a thing that is neither here nor there, but in between.
The paintings themselves are half-figurative,
half-abstract, their nature shifting like light through a diaphanous
curtain shifting in the breeze. "How painting communicates
is still a big mystery to me," says Mann. She marvels at
how something so basic as oil or water mixed with pigment powdered
dirt can "signal meaning, and how imagination is tied to
form."
As a teacher of this mysterious art, she tries
to keep it simple by emphasizing the profound. "What matters
in the world is making meaning," she says. "What I've
tried to teach all these years is to think about what you care
about. What is interesting about making things is finding out
what matters."
And if she didn't teach? "I'd be a hermit," she confesses.
A seagoing hermit, no doubt.
-Faye S. Wolfe
