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. 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. Oils, her medium of choice since college, are impractical for life on a boat.
Watercolors are a portable, though far less forgiving, form.
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. Still, it was a painstaking, protracted, and often frustrating business. 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.