During the months of July and August the Gallery of Rural Art at The National Agricultural Center and Hall of Fame will feature “Agricultural Watercolors from Southeastern Pennsylvania,” an exhibition of watercolors by Pennsylvania artist James Mann.

Pursuing a life long love... to draw and to paint... James Mann periodically works on a growing series of agricultural watercolors... paintings that document the smaller, family owned and operated farms that are the foundation of this country. In Southeastern Pennsylvania, they are rapidly disappearing... victims of urban sprawl and the pressures of an ever expanding population. In 1986,Mann purchased the remnants of a small dairy farm in Lehigh County that was being subdivided for a new housing development and began to farm the remaining land. For the next eighteen years he maintained a small herd of steers, some pigs and chickens and grew their feed. In 2004, he ceased active farming and leased the fields to his neighbor, Horace Longacre. The paintings in this exhibition are a sampling of Mann’s agricultural watercolors, dating from 1994 to the present.

Mann is presently employed as the Architectural Illustrator of the University of Pennsylvania, a position he has held since 1976 in the Office of the University Architect. He has taught several courses in Advanced Perspective Drawing and Presentation Techniques at both Drexel University and at the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science. Mann is a member of the American Institute of Graphic Artists, the American Society of Architectural Illustrators, the New York Society of Renderers and the Society for Environmental Graphic Design.

Mann has provided artwork for a variety of firms and institutions, including the Bucks-Montgomery Farm Bureau, Carlo Rossi Winery, Central Michigan University, DuPont Corporation, FarmSaver.com, Milton S. Hershey Foundation, Penn Press, Philadelphia Regional Port Authority, Quakertown National Bank, University of Alaska at Anchorage and an assortment of architectural and design firms.

For more information about visit James Mann's website