Art, Song, Food--and Ukulele Lessons!
A modern day 'Renaissance Woman' does it all
A perfect strawberry dipped in chocolate to celebrate a milestone birthday. A complicated cake that overflows the pan, but is rescued and made beautiful. A delightful honeydew-watermelon sorbet accented with cayenne.
These are some of the illustrated posts that first drew me to Jean Mann on Facebook via “Who’s In The Kitchen?” It was a group started by Beth Marlin Lichter during the pandemic as a way for folks who were stuck at home and cooking a lot more than usual to connect and share recipes and mouthwatering pictures of whatever they were eating.
I found myself commenting frequently on Jean’s whimsical watercolor pictures, created in small notebooks and accompanied by recipe notes and comments written in a spidery black scrawl. Almost every day, there was a new post—sometimes the artist was just musing on what she was eating for breakfast:
Or it might be a picnic of tofu banh mi, potato salad and fruit on her front porch:
“Today's lunch, brought to you by what's in the fridge,” she wrote in one post.
“When are you going to write a cookbook?” I asked on one post.
After talking to Jean for an hour on Zoom recently, I figure the book deal won’t happen right away. The girl is likely to be just too darn busy juggling multiple creative pursuits: music (guitar, ukulele, songwriting, singing, teaching, performing and touring); cooking (private home chef, meal planner and cook); art (recycled glass art lights business, watercolorist). Based on 300-plus drawings from her latest project, I’d say she’s a memoirist/graphic artist as well.
“I’ve been accused of being a Renaissance woman,” she told me. Sounds like an apt description to me. In the conversation from her historic cottage near Lake Washington in Seattle, which she shares with her small white pooch, Sunny, a 12-year-old mixed terrier, Jean talked about the many facets of her life and career. It was just a few days after a freak heatwave had sent temps in the Emerald City soaring to a high of 110 degrees.
Her cottage, more than 100 years old, has almost no insulation and no air conditioning, so Jean and her fellow cottage dwellers, mostly creative types like herself, suffered. Jean was thankful for a cooler basement, which is where she offers ukulele lessons via Zoom, turning to the online platform after in-person teaching—along with almost all her other pursuits—became impossible.
Teaching ukulele to students who come to her from across the state and even out of state, occupied her, along with her daily notebook musings about food and life when the lockdown shut down music touring, in-person lessons and her recycled glass lights business.
As for the art that first caught my attention, Jean began doing it on Sept. 1, 2020 as part of an artistic challenge (Art365 or #art365 on Instagram) to do something creative every day for a year—without any expectation of commercial gain. She found some watercolor crayons, a paintbrush and a tiny sketchbook with some empty pages—and that’s how it began. When we spoke, she was on Day 302 and had filled up five cell-phone-sized notebooks. She’s not sure what will happen after Day 365!
She never tries to draw exactly what she sees, but rather what she feels, tastes, loves or remembers. Sometimes it’s just an impression she had of someone she cared about who passed away suddenly or a wonderful ritual she repeats each birthday—dipping a ripe strawberry in sun-melted chocolate.
Roots, Food and Music
Born in Bellingham, WA, the sixth of seven children, Jean is mostly a self-taught cook (the “self-taught” label describes almost all her creative pursuits). She picked up a few cooking tips helping her mother and grandmothers prep for Sunday dinner and learned more about nutrition when she became a vegetarian at 12.
Her real passion for cooking started in the early 1980’s when she moved out of the family home. Around that time, she discovered Mollie Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook.
“It changed my life,” she said. And not only the creative vegetarian recipes. “[Katzen’s] wonderful handwritten recipes and illustrations influenced some of my early food sketches.”
As an Interdisciplinary Arts major at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Jean was able to satisfy her multiple interests in music, art and dance without having to pick just one. To support herself post-college, she created a career as a home chef for private clients, something she said didn’t exist at the time. She would plan menus, pile the groceries into a trunk on the back of her Vespa scooter, head for her clients’ homes in Seattle or elsewhere, cook the meals and leave them in the fridge with instructions for reheating.
One day at age 35, while housesitting for a client, she picked up a Gibson guitar and rediscovered a passion she had put aside some years earlier. Three years later, she was inspired to write a song about a lost love, the first she’d ever written. She played it for her mother, who lay in hospice. It was a kind of art-as-therapy, she said, and it helped trigger a new career as a songwriter and performer.
“My mom happened to be just about twice my age at the time she died. I thought, ‘If this happens to be my halfway point, what do I want to do with the other half of my life?’ ” The resounding answer? Art—or, more specifically, every creative endeavor she felt like pursuing.
At age 60, Jean has turned out eight albums mostly filled wth her own songs, plus a few cover tunes like “My Funny Valentine” and “Moon River.” She describes her music as “an eclectic alt-folk jazz-tinged” mix. “It’s kind of poetry set to music.”
You can hear her latest album, “Feast of Days,” on her website, jeanmann.net. The site includes a video of a beautiful song she wrote called “Nothing in the Way” that describes “what a life of creativity means to me,” she said.
As for the recycled glass lights biz, that was also somewhat inspired by her mother’s passing as well. As she sat by her mom’s bedside, she brought some materials to create lights—multicolored remnants of recycled glass fitted onto strings of clear lights—and put a string above her mom’s bed. “I would sit there and look up. You could see this beautiful big circle of colorful, sparkly, almost circus-like lights. So that’s what she passed away seeing.”
Her partner in the glass business for the past 21 years is a 92-year-old woman who lives in one of the cottages. “She’s incredibly vibrant. You’d never know she was 92.”
All her businesses, including the glass business suffered during the pandemic, though, with restrictions lifting, Jean is contemplating returning to touring—but she’s taking it slowly. She does her own booking and her favorite venues for putting on concerts are people’s homes or gardens. Sometimes they’re multimedia events, like one she did in Belgium, which included a cooking demo and recycled-glass lights stringing, plus a concert for a group of women at someone’s home.
“It was so amazing! It was my complete happy place,” she said.
If I like, she said, she’ll put on a concert/workshop/cooking event at my house sometime. She might even make that chocolate croissant bread pudding she was describing. I may take her up on that!
Meanwhile, I’m going to enjoy those posts for the next 45 days. Then I hope she decides to go on for another 365!
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What a sweet and inspiring story. Jean's art and cookbook is so unique and fun. She could create a new typeface with her lettering.