2008-06-14 In pursuit of light

This book is about my grandfather, a man about whom I know much.

Cyril Mann was a man who lived for art. His passion comes through strongly in his work, where he constantly sought to represent the power of the sun, and the varied effects of light on whatever it touched. Some of his paintings have an almost apocalyptic feel with the representation of the burning orb of the sun set squarely within the painting. He would often paint facing directly into the sun, in a way that indicated his obsession with this life-giving object. A quote of his illustrates this well: "I do not paint the object, but the way the light falls upon it". His career spanned several styles, each building on the one before, showing an amazing breadth of artistic genres but each one clearly following the central theme to his artistic life. This book shows this progression - from early works showing his burgeoning talent such as "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", then his series of sunlit and shadowy London paintings that evoke the postwar city so strongly, going on to his still lives where light and shadow are depicted like heavy veils dropped over everyday objects, to his final pieces such as "Ecce Homo", a brutally honest, triumphant yet despairing look into the artistic mirror as old age and mental illness started to take hold of him.

Cyril Mann's single-minded dedication to Art with a capital A is also well depicted in the book. A fierce, intense man, he was never less than passionate in anything, and his quarrelsome nature and refusal to compromise his beliefs or strongly-held opinions (or art) for anyone contributed to his relative lack of success during his lifetime despite his obvious talent. Yet financial hardship or difficult circumstances never swerved him from his dedication to his vocation. My mother described him doggedly going out into the devastated bombsites of postwar East London to set up in the street and paint what he saw, occasionally irritably chasing off the street urchins who would gather to peer over his shoulder.

Cyril Mann was an artistic genius that the 20th Century never recognised - in part due to his own personality, that same intense, fierce personality that created the passion that made his art so powerful. This book tries to put Mann into the artistic canon where he belongs.

A website is being developed to showcase Cyril Mann's life and work and can be found on: www.cyrilmann.co.uk