Artists – M

Frances Mann writes about her painting:My small landscape paintings tend to be ‘portraits’ of the light at a particular time. A colour chord to do with a specific light is always the most important thing but space is vital too and therefore so is the drawing. I love Cezanne’s phrase ‘a minute of the world going by’.Frances trained at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in the seventies where she met and subsequently married the painter Sargy Mann. She has exhibited regularly in London, and taught at Camberwell and the Royal Drawing School.

Sargy Mann (1937-2015) is considered to be one of the most important artists of his generation. Throughout his life Sargy had a fascination with how we see the world around us and how best to communicate that experience through painting. The long hot summer of 1976 was a key moment in Sargy’s development as an artist. He spent several weeks in Thorington Street, Suffolk where he produced an astonishing amount of work and where his painting underwent a series of important transformations. The collection shown here dates from this period as Sargy searched for the new language of painting he knew he needed to find. The paintings he produced that summer were also his apprenticeship in using colour and were critical to the development of his later work.From his thirties, Sargy experienced serious eye problems, and from the 1980s onwards his eyesight continued to worsen. After the total loss of his sight in 2005 he continued to paint, developing new ways of working which he found creatively liberating. It is probably for these late paintings that Sargy is best known. However, the transformative summer of 1976 was a moment of change and of breakthroughs which made these works possible.

In the early 1940s Margaret Mellis had been part of the development of British abstraction in St Ives, Cornwall. She had worked with Naum Gabo and Ben Nicholson, but after leaving Cornwall in 1946, her contribution was quickly forgotten. From 1950 Mellis was based in North Suffolk, where her work moved between abstraction and the figurative, collage, painting and construction.In the late 1970s Mellis began to form constructions out of driftwood, works that synthesised the various strands of her artistic practice.\n\nMargaret Mellis’ works were exhibited widely in her lifetime and are represented in major national collections. In 2008 Margaret Mellis: A Life in Colour opened at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich. The exhibition Margaret Mellis: Modernist Constructs ran at the Towner Gallery, Eastbourne from 2021-22.

Glyn Morgan was a Welshman like Cedric Morris, whose Benton End School of Painting at Hadleigh he attended. Morris was a major influence and a great supporter of Glyn’s work all his life. (Glyn also studied at Camberwell). His flickering, visionary landscapes, richly coloured and often with deep impasto, carry echoes of Blake, Palmer and Sutherland.Glyn was an important and truly imaginative artist and his work can be found in many major public collections.