Blair mann

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Blair Ison Mann is a native of Atlanta, Georgia and has a lifelong fascination with art, an enormous love of color, and an impulse to create. She responds to nature with delight. She loves the expression of life and joy she finds in the world around us and would like to share this expression. Blair is always seeking, always searching and striving to do this in a fresh way. Her curiosity about the world and her delight in travel and exotic places certainly have helped to expand her creative activities and sensibilities.
On canvas she has worked in acrylics, oil, and mixed media. Blair has worked in pastels and with clay. She has studied painting and drawing at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, in Paris, and in Florence, Italy. Her long term teacher and mentor was Ouida Canaday;  others teachers have included Ben Smith, Debra Fritts, Bill Bohlin, Kenn Auster, Dolores Kennedy, Charles Sovek, Bob Rohm, Guido Frick,  Ann Templeton, Carol Marine, Nancy Franke, Romel de la Torre, Robert Johnson, and continue to include landscape with Bill Davidson and Jim Richards, still life and figure with Maggie Siner, and figure with Kevin Beilfuss.
Blair's past works in ceramics have been shown through the Abstein Gallery in Atlanta, the Loretta Goodwin Gallery in Birmingham, Alabama, and the Main Street Gallery in Clayton, Georgia. She enjoyed much success with the very popular "face" plates at Henri Bendel in New York City. She was featured in the Lifestyle section of the Atlanta Journal/Constitution in 1997, and was the featured artist at the Trinity Schools Art Auction in Atlanta in 1998. Her work was photographed and commented upon for the 1996 Artists and Graphic Designers reference book. In 1994 her work on canvas was featured in the Atlanta Artists Association Traveling show where she won an honorable mention award.  
Blair continues to study and paint in oils, in the studio and en plain air.  For several years she has studied figure painting with Atlanta's renowned Marc Chatov. An important teacher/mentor of late has been Chris Groves from Charleston.
Her hope is to relate something of herself to other people, to bear witness to the joy and beauty and truth in life and nature. She desires to forever remain open to and be thrilled by the ongoing process of making art, to always seek and be learning, and to keep a youthful enthusiasm, though seasoned point of view in her work.