Margaret Mellis

Margaret Nairne Mellis (22 January 1914 – 17 March 2009) 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.

Life Mellis was born in Wukingfu (Wujingfu), Swatow, China, where her father was a Presbyterian missionary. Her family returned to East Lothian when she was one year old, shortly after the First World War broke out, so her father David Barclay Mellis-Smith could join up.

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. They visited Ezra Pound in Italy during their honeymoon and returned to London, where she studied at the Euston Road School. 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.

The breakdown of her first marriage caused her to reject abstraction for a period, returning to representational painting. However, works from the mid-1950s moved away from direct representation, simplifying still life and landscapes to flattened areas of pure colour. By the 1970s work was almost totally abstract and focused on geometric shape and colour.

In 1980 Mellis started making constructions out of found pieces of driftwood, which was to become her central practice until the end of her career. Whilst still retaining elements of representation, these works were more closely concerned with the relationship between form and colour. Her work is featured in major collections such as the Tate Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Arts Council Collection, The Fleming Collection, City Art Centre, Edinburgh and the National Galleries of Scotland.

In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.