Sunday Reception At Library––

Fine Porcelain Carvings On Exhibit

By Dottie Evans

Newtown residents and art lovers will have an opportunity Sunday afternoon, October 19, to meet internationally acclaimed artist and master craftsman Jean Mann at a reception held at the Cyrenius Booth Library at 25 Main Street, from 2 to 4 pm, in the meeting room.

The reception marks the opening of an exhibit of her carved porcelain sculptures and miniatures that will be on view at the library in the first and second floor glass display cases through the third week of November.

Ms Mann, who lives and teaches in New Fairfield, has been working with various types of clay and stone for more than 50 years. Her porcelains are in the permanent collections of 12 museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Museum Haaretz in Tel Aviv, Israel. Among her many achievements are the Master Craftsman/Educator Award from The Society for Connecticut Crafts in 1995, and a grant from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts in 1981.

Although Ms Mann teaches clay and porcelain, wheel, hand methods of making pottery, glazing, firing, sculpture, and carving, she remarked during a September 15 interview that “porcelain is where it all came together for me.”

“All my life I was looking for something, and the moment I touched porcelain, I knew I’d found it. I can’t find anything it won’t permit. All the things I learned you can’t do with clay, you can do with porcelain,” she added.

While working with porcelain on a potter’s wheel, Ms Mann explained, there is a different sort of elasticity. Following what she has termed a “terribly exacting” process of carving using surgical scalpels and dental tools, the sculptor of fine porcelain miniatures must proceed with the utmost caution, she said.

The special qualities of porcelain are proven under fire, as it were, when the finished piece is baked under extremely high temperatures of 2,385 degrees F. Then it is glazed, and its unique translucent quality becomes evident.

Porcelain Pandas Illuminated

This delicate translucency can be best appreciated in one of Ms Mann’s larger sculptures that will be on display at the Booth Library, a carved porcelain brush holder decorated with panda figures –– one of two she has recently completed on commission.

Light not only glows through the glazed surface of the material but it also penetrates freely through a pattern of carved openings between the bamboo shoots that decorate its rim. As the light plays through and over the piece, the precise and delicate nature of its carving is enhanced.

 In looking at the work from all sides, we see a fanciful world of pandas rendered not only with close observation but with much affection. Each panda is seen in a slightly different pose –– relaxing, playing, cradling young, or eating stalks of bamboo.

When asked about her obvious fondness for pandas, Ms Mann said she had visited China a few years ago and had the animals up close in a zoo. She purchased an apple to give to one panda, and as he ate it, she touched his black fur, which she said looked soft, but was actually “quite bristley.”

“I was charmed by them,” she remarked.

A Dragon Boat For Marni

Another of Ms Mann’s fine porcelain art on view at the Booth Library will be the “Dragon Boat,” a two-and-a-half-inch miniature that is dedicated to the memory of Marni Wood, a longtime friend of Jean Mann who shared her love of Chinese philosophy and art.

“She was a big influence in my life,” Ms Mann said, speaking of the time between 1964 and 1970, when she had lived in Newtown and had known Mrs Wood and her husband, Harrie Wood.

“The tiny figure you see inside the boat, that’s Marni. I gave her an Oriental face and she is only one-eighth-inch high,” she said of her friend, adding that she decided on the dragon boat as a memorial for her friend, since it is sometimes thought of as a conveyance for the spirit.

The dragon boat has been exhibited widely in Connecticut and New York, and remains in Ms Mann’s private collection, but it will someday be a part of the Cyrenius Booth Library’s permanent collection, to be handed over at the time of her death along with other works by local Newtown artists that she has collected.

“I want [these things] to stay in Newtown where they belong,” Ms Mann said in February 1998, at the time of her decision.

Jean Mann when to New York City at 18 to Juilliard and David Mannes (then Music School, now College) and attended Hunter College at nights while working for a shipping company. After studying sculpture with Irma Rothstein for several years, she became an apprentice to Donald Mavros who taught sculpture and pottery.

From her New Fairfield studio called The Kick Wheel, Ms Mann teaches private students as well as two regular adult education classes for the town.