theartofmann | archive

Thank you!

“Who am I?
If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I haunt.”

— Andre Breton

“My paintings are landscapes to enter and explore, to decode. They are challenges to understand the meanings behind combinations of words, symbols and colors. They are invitations to investigate the significance of associations between juxtaposed elements and phrases, simply put dreams. Motivated by the challenge of deﬁning vast expanses of time through layers, I collect materials. Gathered throughout time, by myself and others: a news clipping from the Moon Landing my grandmother saved, a ﬂyer from a show I saw in Toronto, or a ticket stub from a movie with someone I loved. Materials layered like the rings of trees, compressing time through a collage technique I developed using acrylic paint and a variety of stains, glazes, dirt, ash on wood panels and parts of weathered barns and houses. The struggle to express my most inner thoughts and ideas, the materials, the land have awakened a vision of eternity in me.”

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

2020 ThunderSky INC, Cincinnati, OH
2019 934 Gallery, Columbus, OH
2019 Gathered Gallery, Bellevue, KY
2019 The Red Door Project, Cincinnati, OH
2018 Secret Artworks, Cincinnati, OH
2014 Greenwich House Gallery, Cincinnati, OH
2012 Synthetica-M, Cincinnati, OH
2011 Cynthiana Art Walk, Cynthiana, KY
2011 BoxHeart Gallery, Pittsburg, PA
2009 Chapman Friedman Gallery, Louisville, KY
2008 Syntetica, Cincinnati, OH
2008 El Ojito Springs, Tucson, AZ
2008 Art Access, Columbus, OH
2008 Artonomy, Cincinnati, OH
2007 The Greenwich, Cincinnati, OH
2007 Terra Gallery, Columbus, OH
2007 The Agora, Columbus, OH
2007 The Marx Gallery, Covington, KY
2006 qTen, Westerville, OH
2006 Art For Life, Columbus, OH
2006 Xoma Gallery, Cincinnati, OH
2006 The Kirsten Bowen Gallery, Columbus, OH
2005 The Schumacher Gallery, Columbus, OH
2005 Durkin’s Eclectic Art Limited, Columbus, OH
2005 MadLab, Columbus, OH
2005 “M” an Ultramodern Gallery, Covington, KY
2004 St. Mary’s Cathedral Basilica, Covington, KY
2003 Studio ASH, Columbus, OH
2003 Cox Fine Arts Center/OSF, Columbus, OH
2002 Edward Hopper House, Nyack, NY
2002 Rocky Mount Arts Center, Rocky Mount, NC
2002 Franklin Square Gallery, Southport, NC

“Thought-provoking pieces …powerful, intriguing, and pleasing to look at.”

— Bill Mayr, Columbus Dispatch

“Men do not live once only and then depart hence forever. They live many times in many places, although not always on this world. Between each life there is a veil of darkness. The door will open at last and show us all the chambers through which our feet have wandered from the beginning…”

— Egyptian Papyrus Scroll by Anana, Chief Scribe to King Seti II, Circa 1320 BC

““Mann is one of the artistic visionaries of my generation. His worldview is conflicted in a self-effacing way; he is aware of our troubles, and wishes to do more than observe, but isn’t necessarily idealistic enough to commit to the causes of the Twitter people…so he draws up fences around what is his, and looks outward, a documentarian who spurns the newsfeed in favor of old news clippings, using the shapes of found scraps of linoleum and elderly farming implements to describe a rusted America: a culture of fertile rot, hopeful in its decay, optimistic in entropy.””

— David S. Lewis, Editor, (614) Magazine

“My work is presented to you as a documentation of my attempts to express myself and my attitude, my joy and appreciation, my relationship to the past and others, and my purpose.”

SELECTED COMMISSIONS & COLLECTIONS

Kroger West Chester
Hotel Covington, Collection
“Love and Other Drugs”, Edward Zwick Film
Nancy “Nana” Lampton, Collection
Extreme Makeover Home Edition, Television Series
Tracie McGarity Interiors, Commission
EMH&T, Collection
Fresh A.I.R Gallery, Collection
Excellent Pictures & Words, Commission
LD Management Co Inc, Collection
Ivonne Lie, Indonesia, Collection

“Mann’s work is perfectly balanced between quiet and chaos, like a traveler’s letter, a mosaic of emotions on a wide and empty colored landscape.”

— Opus Mang, Parisian Art Critic

Phi: The Golden Ratio = 1.61803399

The golden ratio has been claimed to have held a special fascination for at least 2,400 years, although without reliable evidence. According to Mario Livio:

Some of the greatest mathematical minds of all ages, from Pythagoras and Euclid in ancient Greece, through the medieval Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa and the Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler, to present-day scientific figures such as Oxford physicist Roger Penrose, have spent endless hours over this simple ratio and its properties. But the fascination with the Golden Ratio is not confined just to mathematicians. Biologists, artists, musicians, historians, architects, psychologists, and even mystics have pondered and debated the basis of its ubiquity and appeal. In fact, it is probably fair to say that the Golden Ratio has inspired thinkers of all disciplines like no other number in the history of mathematics

I think we must start by agreeing that the function of visual art is to convey an infinite number and variety of human thoughts into an infinite number and variety of images. The image has to pass thru the artist’s conciseness before it can be articulated. Where does the image comes from? There is such a thing as unconditional expression that does not come from self or other. It manifests out of nowhere like mushrooms in a meadow, like hailstorms, like thunderstorms. Contending with this unknown, possessed by it in fact, the artist puts himself on the imagistic frontier, out into that unknown, taking a piece of it and transforming that piece into a mythological image. Not knowing exactly what he is doing the artist, guided by intuition, contends with something not understood, in order to make it more understandable. We gaze at artwork, begin to become informed by it, but we don’t know why. We don’t know, we gaze at art ignorantly, the unknown shining through it, at us, in partially articulated form, and that I believe is the rule of art.

My work is a mixed-media collage compromising multiple layers of materials using wallpaper paste, contact cement and spray adhesives along with alternating layers of water based and oil-based mediums, acrylics, watercolor, ink, oil and charcoal. I use urethanes, varnishes and shellacs to stabilize extremely thick applications of wax, plaster, ash, dirt, sawdust, along with fabric, snakeskin, rose petals and leaves and other found objects. I am trying to arrange collaged elements with a variety of media until those elements do not seem arranged, until they are as natural as a stream bubbling or the wind in the leaves. Not forcing an image on the viewer, instead letting the viewer find the unknown in the painting themselves; you could say that painting a tree is a form of propaganda, an artist forcing their thoughts and ideas of a tree onto the viewer – propaganda is not the ideal of my art. I believe that a newspaper headline from 1965 holds the energy of the event, that materials are imbued with qualities related to their age and creation; scraps cut from other drawings are representations of the time and the energy required to create them. That they imprint some sort of psychic residue on the viewer; that these materials that have been used become the ghost of that use. The effects of colors, cutting up old books and newspapers, and digital printouts an authentic journey into my subconscious - the infinite possibilities of existence. I work solely with ghosts, weaving them together in a way that allows the viewer to tell a story – to dream gazing at the landscape. The viewer’s personal experience dictates the emotional value of the printed elements; a movie ticket for instance – an action film, but the memory is of the last time you held your love’s hand.

All of work is painted on Masonite or plywood canvases, or parts of old pieces of barn siding and houses, A new canvas is too sterile for my tastes.

In my studio I have a large rolling cabinet filled with all my collage materials, this cabinet is a physical representation of my subconscious; a dream box. There is no organization everything thrown in like a trash can, I have spent countless hours digging through these scraps and pieces. These pieces have touched me in a deeply personal way I can remember working on old paintings just by seeing a scrap or remnant. The materials I have been collecting for over twenty years, old newspapers and magazines bought at thrift stores and eBay auction. Old drawings and paintings, scraps given to me by friends and family as well as followers of my work. Each element of the painting exists in an assigned moment in time, using numerical principles such as phi and logistics maps and studying Vedic math and sacred geometry (Thangka Paintings) to juxtapose textures and colors and balance the composition giving the work a symbolic or sacred dimension, a dream scene a riddle. My paintings are landscapes for the viewer to enter and explore onto which they can project subconscious messages. Working an area until it looks good and then disrupting in with a brush stroke or gluing in a scrap of something; a constant circular process of build and destroy. At some point I realized this was a mimicking of time and the effects of age, the seasons – life on the farm. This earthy aspect bloomed over time into vast complicated landscapes carving is used to remove materials from the paintings surface, painting through subtraction the surfaces are sometimes marred, gouged and sanded. Destruction is as important an element in the process as creation – never be afraid to make mistakes or “ruin” a painting. created spontaneously during the painting process; mimicking thought not allowing an image to become seated in the mind and forced on the viewer screen printing, screening through drapes which creates an “imperfect” print, arbitrary mistakes in patterns represents the chaotic nature of everything. Also, for the first time a digital camera was used to document the progression of pieces. The camera was an excellent tool for experimentation allowing for easy reproduction, increasing the speed by which pieces can be created. More and more photography is being used to capture and document images to be used in the “cut-up” processes that begin most of these pieces

Two quantities a and b are said to be in the golden ratio φ if a+ba=ab=φ.

One method for finding the value of φ is to start with the left fraction. Through simplifying the fraction and substituting in b/a = 1/φ, a+ba=1+ba=1+1φ.

Therefore, 1+1φ=φ.

Multiplying by φ gives φ+1=φ2 which can be rearranged to φ2−φ−1=0.

Using the quadratic formula, two solutions are obtained:

φ=1+52=1.6180339887… and φ=1−52=−0.6180339887…

Because φ is the ratio between positive quantities φ is necessarily positive:

φ=1+52=1.6180339887… .

I was born in 1975 in a small farming community where the North Fork and South Fork of the Licking River merge in Northern Kentucky, my parents came from farming families and we farmed tobacco and cattle. The Licking River runs north, and I have heard that there are only seven rivers that run north, I doubt that is true, but I do know the town of Falmouth gets wiped out by floods every 33 years. My parents worked jobs and we farmed, when I was young my mother would take me to the neighbor’s house Ellen Jones her husband Al drove a truck for Sears, she would give me their son’s old comic books and a pad of typewriter paper and I would trace the covers. It was a challenge for a boy too young to write and I would frequently lose my temper. In that process I found my own way to hold a pencil, my Grandma Mann a retired schoolteacher said to leave me alone I was good at drawing and didn’t want to disrupt that. Grandma let me experiment with papier mâché, I made dinosaurs and space shuttles complete with solid rocket boosters and external tank. On snow days at my Grandma Johnston’s house, she lived in an old rock house across from the elementary school (now a museum and office of the historical society) we would walk to the Farmer’s Market and I would ask Keith Fardo if he had any cardboard boxes. I would spend the day making boats, planes, trucks out of the boxes cutting the shapes and using masking tape.

I was always drawing, checking out drawing books and origami books from the library memorizing the pages. In 7th grade I met Brenda McGinnis the art teacher, she thought I was talented and helped nurture my skills, in fact she gave me my only formal fine arts training to this day. When I went to high school she followed and was my art teacher for four years and helped me get into College a graphic design trade school ACA College of Design in Cincinnati.

In 1996 a received an associate degree in Graphic Design from ACA and was working as a Graphic Designer for a retail design firm in northern Kentucky. I worked a couple different design jobs and lived in the Caribbean for while working for an advertising firm and ended up in Columbus Ohio working for another Retail Design Firm. I was never really that happy with the design work it wasn’t creative enough for me and eventually I came to an impasse with my boss in Columbus and found myself drawing unemployment in 1999.

I was 23 living in a small apartment in a big complex with a roommate who had graduated from CCAD with an Industrial Design Degree. He had some art supplies and I had nothing but free time, so one night I started painting. In a lot of ways, it was the first “serious” painting I had ever done, the only purpose was to show my roommate I was an artist. That painting ‘Trouble for the Voinovich Boys’ was very successful not only did it convince my roommate I “was” an artist, but it later was the first painting I ever shown in a gallery, The Edward Hopper House in Upper Nyack New York.

In 2005 my grandpa passed away and some of his property was auctioned and I purchased a couple acres containing the old garage, bard and corn crib. At the time I lived in Columbus and would load up my van with all my materials and drive down to paint in and around the barn. I used whatever I could find to paint on and created 100s of pieces over the next 2-3 years. In 2007 I moved into the old farmhouse and became a farmer, turning one of the upstairs bedrooms into a studio. The farm was sold in 2017.

… Avalokiteśvara vowing never to rest until he had freed all sentient beings from saṃsāra. Despite strenuous effort, he realizes that still many unhappy beings were yet to be saved. After struggling to comprehend the needs of so many, his head splits into eleven pieces. Amitābha, seeing his plight, gives him eleven heads with which to hear the cries of the suffering. Upon hearing these cries and comprehending them, Avalokiteśvara attempts to reach out to all those who needed aid, but found that his two arms shattered into pieces. Once more, Amitābha comes to his aid and invests him with a thousand arms with which to aid the suffering multitudes.

The world moves through me like the sun through trees,
the ocean tide high and low, my heart beating…
bump bump, bump bump.
Unchangeable coming and going…
That is enough.
The mind lies and tells me I am moving away or towards perfection (ideal)
I must remember neither are true, both are constant.
Neither are true both are constant
bump bump, bump bump.
I see you pride.
I am trying to arrange objects/ideas until they don’t seem arranged,
until they feel like a stream bubbling in the woods or the wind in the leaves.

bump bump, bump bump