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44859_Text:Layout 1 31/1/08 15:05 Page 1 MARGARET MELLIS constructions AUSTIN DESMOND FINE ART 44859_Text:Layout 1 31/1/08 15:05 Page 2 44859_Text:Layout 1 31/1/08 15:05 Page 3 Foreword It is a great privilege to have worked with Margaret Mellis over the last decade. We first met in 1999 when I was curating a solo exhibition at Austin Desmond in collaboration with Newlyn Art Gallery. Margaret was 86 at the time, still full of energy and still working. This exhibition, her third at Austin Desmond, shows what is perhaps the most significant body of work Margaret Mellis has produced in her long and productive career; the driftwood constructions. Mined from the beaches off the Suffolk coast where she has lived and worked for over 60 years, the objects and fragments thrown up by the sea which found their way into Margaret’s studio, embody the central theme of her life’s work. Started in 1980 these constructions became the focus of Margaret’s attention. Now aged 94 Margaret is no longer working but the 20 years in which she made these constructions are her response to the world. She has carried, from a very early age, a deep understanding of colour and nowhere in her work in this more evident than in the constructions. In transforming the debris of human activity into objects that are imbued with an elemental energy, a profound expression in which humour, pathos and the poetic also play their part, ensures that Margaret Mellis has earned a place of individual distinction. Austin Desmond would like to thank Michael Bird for his insightful and thoughtful essay on Margaret’s work. We would also like to thank Telfer Stokes for his advice and loan of archival material. A 60 minute documentary ‘Margaret Mellis: A Life in Colour’ will be available on DVD from July 7th 2008 and can be ordered online (details on page 52). The film traces Margaret’s creative life through her work and words using recordings from the National Sound Archive and with Margaret’s writings read by Susannah York. Catriona Colledge Austin Desmond Fine Art 44859_Text:Layout 1 31/1/08 15:05 Page 4 The Transformed Total: Margaret Mellis’s Constructions Michael Bird In 1978 Margaret Mellis, then in her mid-sixties, assembled some pieces of driftwood into an ad hoc sculpture. This was the beginning of what turned out to be a new phase in her art. Anyone could have picked up these fragments – wave- worn plywood boards untidily snapped like indigestible wafers, bust planks and wooden fillets that had once been painted red, blue or green for some purpose now impossible to ascertain. Rescued from the tideline dumping ground of leathery wrack and mangled rope, these scraps of unvalued jetsam were shaped by whatever had happened to happen to them. Mellis played about, arranging and rearranging, much as friends often observed her instinctively adjust the placing of ordinary objects – a bowl on a windowsill, a napkin and knife on a tabletop – until they ‘looked right’. Screwed into place, the provisional configuration became a permanent construction that could be hung on the wall and looked at. No longer spread on the floor to be accidentally destroyed or thrown back on the woodpile, it had crossed an invisible line that distinguished those ephemeral still-lifes into which Mellis conjured her domestic surroundings from the creations of her art. 4 44859_Text:Layout 1 31/1/08 15:05 Page 5 1 ‘F’ 1997 driftwood construction 148 x 145 x 6 cm 44859_Text:Layout 1 31/1/08 15:05 Page 6 Adrian Stokes, Venice c.1928 It was almost fifty years earlier that she had started out as a student painter in the French-influenced mode of her tutors at Edinburgh College of Art, notably the Scottish landscapist W.G. Gillies. There followed the semi-obligatory spell in Paris in 1933, studying with Gillies’s former mentor André Lhote, whose passion for Cézanne had by that time evolved into cubistic figure paintings, then further travels in France, North Africa, Italy and Spain, and another visit to Paris in summer 1937. Here, at the Exposition Internationale,1 she must have witnessed the ominously confrontational style of the Nazi German and Soviet pavilions, and may also have seen Picasso’s Guernica in the pavilion of the doomed Spanish Republic. She certainly took in an exhibition of early Cézannes in the newly constructed Palais de Tokyo, where she got into conversation with a charismatic, well-travelled English writer of improbably eclectic interests. In retrospect, the circumstances of this meeting were a mixed augury both for Mellis’s future relationship with Adrian Stokes (whom she married the following year) and for her own artistic career. Cézanne was on show as a latter-day hero of the grand tradition of French painting, but he was also venerated by the 6 44859_Text:Layout 1 31/1/08 15:05 Page 7 2 Marsh Mist 1992 driftwood construction 71 x 55.3 x 3 cm 44859_Text:Layout 1 31/1/08 15:05 Page 8 Pots and Fruit c.1960 oil on hardboard 45 x 54 cm avant-garde. It took Stokes some time (and the British art public much longer) to discover that the gamine young Scottish artist who seemed, like him, engrossed by classic painterly questions of colour and form, also had it in her to play a very different kind of game. If it was hard to be sure before then, it became clear around 1940 that Mellis was decidedly not going to spend the rest of her life producing pleasantly derivative homages to Gillies, Lhote or Cézanne. Now living in Cornwall, with the war on and, after the birth of her son Telfer in 1940, a child to care for, she nevertheless managed to create her first wholly distinctive body of work – a sporadic yet somehow confident and complete series of abstract paper collages that counts among the most vivid, unusual work to come out of St Ives during the war. Some were included in a popular 1942 exhibition in London, New Movements in Art (which in the event proved a false dawn for progressive abstract art in Britain), but professionally they got Mellis nowhere. Divorce from Stokes; a new marriage, to the painter Francis Davison (whose own career seemed to demand precedence from 8 44859_Text:Layout 1 31/1/08 15:05 Page 9 ‘I was simplifying my painting when Nicholson and Gabo came to St Ives in 1939. Ben Nicholson was interested and suggested that I should do a collage. At the beginning of 1940, I did one. I got completely hooked. The 11th one was the first ‘constructavist’ one, it was Construction with a Red Triangle, ( coll. Victoria and Albert Museum). Gabo liked it so much that he asked me to make another, the same. I did and it came out slightly better than the first one. When he left for America he gave it back. He said it would be useful to me.’ Margaret Mellis, October 1984 Collage with Red Triangle 1940 paper collage 29.5 x 23 cm Private Collection 44859_Text:Layout 1 31/1/08 15:05 Page 10 Margaret Mellis (right) and Francis Davison, Cannes 1948 then on); a move to southern France, well out of the London gallery orbit – all this cut across a steady career trajectory, although Mellis continued to work and exhibit. At various times between 1950 and 1980, she produced abstract paintings in the crypto-figurative postwar landscape style; spare, intense flower paintings; interestingly shaped pastel drawings on splayed envelopes; more abstract works, this time in the flat, hard-edge manner fashionable in the 1960s. A few of these pieces found their way into public collections. On the whole, though, Mellis’s loyal critics and collectors belonged to one of those secret confraternities to whom an artist’s voice speaks clear and compelling long before it gets pumped through the PA system of a public reputation. I don’t know that in 1978 even they would have guessed that her next body of work – the largest, longest sustained and, in her view, the best of her career 2 – was about to emerge from a stack of driftwood that fed the fire in the cottage in Southwold, Suffolk, to which she and Davison had moved two years earlier. 10 44859_Text:Layout 1 31/1/08 15:05 Page 11 above top: Floating Tree 1958 oil on board 71 x 91 cm Private Collection above: White Relief 1970 painted wood mounted on hardboard 37.7 x 37.7 cm 44859_Text:Layout 1 31/1/08 15:05 Page 12 Purple Anemonies in Sky Blue 1988 pastel and chalk on coloured envelope 36 x 25.5 cm 12 44859_Text:Layout 1 31/1/08 15:05 Page 13 above top: Trees on the Shore 1958 oil on essex board 71 x 92 cm Private Collection above: Half in Half c.1970/71 painted wood mounted on hardboard 58.4 x 58.4 cm 44859_Text:Layout 1 31/1/08 15:05 Page 14 Detail of studio For some time Mellis had been in the habit of gleaning firewood during walks along the shore or in the country (she had been living in Suffolk since 1950). Once she began to think of the domestic woodpile not as free fuel but as a treasury of unique objets trouvés, however, it became impossible simply to burn it. The stack in the studio grew. In 1979 two more driftwood reliefs came out of it; in 1980 ‘a great spate of them’.