Lavender & Spelt Field, Morning Light Painting

Angela Manno has been a professional artist for the past 40 years and is known for her virtuosity in a vast range of painstaking art forms both east and west, ancient and contemporary. A graduate of Bard College, Manno studied art at the San Francisco Art Institute, Parson's School of Design and l'Ecole des Arts in Lacoste, France. She was trained by a contemporary master of batik, the late Jyotirindra Roy, and studied the ancient liturgical art of Byzantine-Russian iconography under master iconographer, Vladislav Andrejev Manno is an award-winning landscape painter, having studied with instructors trained at the Cape School of Art, founded by Charles Hawthorne and later directed by American colorist Henry Hensche. In a review of her one-woman show in France in 2003, the newspaper La Provence writes: “Though primarily a figurative painter, Angela Manno brings a delicate hint of ‘impressionism‘ to her pastels. . . . Her exacting touch reveals a quest for harmony and elevates the medium of pastel with a faint, suggestive look of oils.” In the 1990s, Ms. Manno added fresco painting to her repertoire, with the completion of a seven-foot fresco at the Palazzo Torlonia, Ceri, Italy and a number of mural projects in the United States. Most recently, Manno has begun painting in oils as well as encaustic, an ancient wax-based medium that ties in to her many years experience with batik which also utilizes molten wax. A three-time grant recipient from the Xerox Corporation, Manno's art has been featured in 20 solo and over 80 group exhibitions. Distinguished venues to exhibit her work include the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C, the Smithsonian Institution, the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and museums from Mexico City to Moscow. Her solo exhibition "Conscious Evolution: The World At One" toured internationally and was seen by more than a quarter of a million people. With the support of private and corporate sponsors - including actor Tom Hanks, AXA Space and Prince Sultan bin Salman bin Abdul-Aziz of Saudi Arabia - the artwork featured in the exhibition became part of the permanent fine art collection of the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. In 1988, Manno was commissioned by NASA to commemorate the U.S. return to space flight with the launch of Discovery, the first after the Challenger accident. She is the only woman visual artist selected for this honor.