margaret mellis

Arts; Painter & Sculptor

January 1914 – March 2009

 Suggested by Sara Lamb

From Wikipedia: Mellis was a Scottish artist, one of the early members and last survivors of the group of modernist artists that gathered in St Ives, in Cornwall, in the 1940s.

She and her first husband, Adrian Stokes, played an important role in the rise of St Ives as a magnet for artists. She later married Francis Davison, also an artist, and became a mentor to the young Damien Hirst.

Mellis was born in Wukingfu Swatow, China, where her father was a Presbyterian missionary. Her family returned to East Lothian in Scotland when she was one year old, shortly after the First World War broke out. Abandoning an initial interest in music, she studied at Edinburgh College of Art from 1930 to 1934 under the Scottish Colourist Samuel Peploe and the landscape painters William Gillies and John Maxwell, alongside Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and William Gear. She used a travel scholarship to study with André Lhote in Paris. She met the art critic Adrian Stokes in 1936 and they married in 1938. They visited Ezra Pound in Italy during their honeymoon and returned to London, where she studied at the Euston Road School.

Looking for a refuge from London before the Second World War broke out, they moved to a house, Little Parc Owles, in Carbis Bay, near St Ives, in 1939. The couple's move to Cornwall was to be a catalyst for the burgeoning modernist movement that was to become internationally renowned throughout the middle of the 20th century. They were soon joined by Margaret's 17 year old sister Ann Stokes, their friends Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth and their triplets, and Naum Gabo and his wife Miriam Gabo, and then subsequently Margaret's college friend Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. Margaret was encouraged to paint small abstract works, and to produce intricate collage. She was inspired by the naïve painter Alfred Wallis.

Mellis was renowned throughout her career as a colourist. While in St Ives under the influence of Nicholson she began to work in relief and collage, most notably Collage with Red Triangle II (1940) which was initially a gift for Naum Gabo and is now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

She exhibited infrequently through much of her life, and Hirst considers that her work has been unduly neglected. A major exhibition was held at Newlyn Art Gallery in 2001, and in 2008 a documentary Margaret Mellis a Life in Colour was made to accompany a major retrospective exhibition of her work at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich.