The Bellingham Herald

Mann x 2
New exhibit is a family affair

EXHIBIT: Siblings Jean and Ben Mann have their art hung at A Lot of Flowers in Fairhaven for a show they call "Sibling Revelry." Jean's work is on the left in the foreground and Ben's is on the wall behind on the right. RACHEL E. BAYNE HERALD PHOTO

Kie Relyea, The Bellingham Herald

Jean Mann's "Afield"

Call it a two-Mann show.

Ben and Jean Mann, who grew up around the shores of Lake Whatcom, have joined up for their first-ever sibling art show - unless you count the living room of their late mother's home.

"We've shown in some of the same places but not concurrently," Ben, 37, explains.

"Sibling Revelry" runs through Nov. 15 at A Lot of Flowers in Fairhaven. The show is a reunion of sorts for the youngest two of seven Mann children.

It features the chalk pastels on paper of Jean Mann and the acrylic on wood of Ben Mann, who's probably best known for taking discarded records - and most recently CDs - and transforming them into clocks with faces bathed in warm colors and a playful air.

His paintings, done on scraps of wood are in the same vein with their folky look and loose, carefree lines.

Flowers in a vase on a purple table, green onions, three waiters striding in tandem - all possess the simplified, exaggerated lines that are a testament to the Fairhaven resident's penchant for cartooning.

"I was probably drawing before I could walk," Ben says as he stands in his sun-lit studio in Fairhaven while painting a black frame on one of his pieces.

A long scar, what he calls his "Zorro scar," runs from Ben's right palm past his wrist, a remnant of the operation to repair the bones broken in a May 30 bike accident.

If you go

DETAILS: "Sibling Revelry" runs through Nov. 15 at A Lot of Flowers, 1212 11th St. in Fairhaven.

The floral shop is open 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sundays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mondays and from 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday.

More about the artists is available at http://www.jeanmann.com/ and http://www.mannmadeillustration.com/.

With the help of a titanium plate in his wrist and intense physical therapy, Ben has been able to paint again.

But the right wrist tires, so he's taken to painting with both hands - left for the backgrounds, right for the more-detailed subjects.

LEFT-MANN

Unlike her right-handed brother, Jean creates her chalk pastels with her left.

Not only because she's left-handed.

There's the matter of fingertips roughened by playing the guitar in her other incarnation as a singer/songwriter who performs in bare feet, the better to feel the Earth.

The sole softy on her hands is the left pinky, which she uses to smudge the pastels into soft-edged dreamscapes of the outer world that speak to her first medium of watercolor.

"My inspiration definitely is nature," says the 41-year-old Seattle resident, who taught herself how to do pastels.

Sometimes that comes out in abstract bands of color and other times in loosely drawn puffy trees that possess the innocent charm of children's book illustrations.

Reach Kie Relyea at 715-2234 or krelyea@bellinghamherald.com.