Painter, collagist, and driving force behind the "Carbis Bay constructivists" of the 1940s.
Though born in China, Margaret Mellis came to the UK a year after her birth, and at the age of 15 attended the Edinburgh College of Art. She studied there until 1933, when she won a travelling scholarship to Paris where she studied in André Lhote's renowned atelier.
In a bid to escape London before the Second World War broke out, Mellis and her first husband, the art critic Adrian Stokes, moved to a house in Carbis Bay near St Ives in 1939. They inspired many of their friends to do the same -- Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Barns-Graham and Naum Gabo all followed in the years after, and so a foundational part of British modernism, the St Ives School, was born.
It was Ben Nicholson who first suggested that Margaret Mellis experiment with abstract collage, and she spent most of the 1940s creating these relief constructions.
The break up of Margaret Mellis's marriage to Stokes (who went on to marry her younger sister, Ann Mellis) brought about two major changes in Mellis's life -- her departure from Cornwall in 1946, and her return to painting:
“I couldn’t even go on with what I was doing, so I went right back to the beginning of where I left off representational painting. I started over again.”
The other artists Mellis was surrounded by at that time became well-known, but Mellis’s own achievements were largely overlooked, arguably because her decision to leave St Ives at that moment simply removed Mellis from the very limelight that was beginning to fall on those other St Ives artists.
After two years living and working in France, Mellis and her second husband, Francis Davison, returned to the UK and settled in Suffolk, where Mellis would spend the rest of her life. In the 1970s Mellis began to make driftwood constructions from pieces of flotsam found on the Suffolk shore. These were robust compositions, only distantly related to her neater, more cerebral constructivism of the 1940s. But some strong themes remain throughout all Mellis's work -- a powerful use of colour, twinned with its opposite, the darkness of decay (the wasted, the washed up, the unwanted), and a compulsion to repurpose material (see also her late "envelope" pieces).
