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Friday 5 December 2008

Shifting combinations

Margaret Mellis: A Life in Colour
Until 31 August

Constructed: 40 Years of the UEA Collection
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, until 14 December

The painter and construction-maker Margaret Mellis has led a remarkable and productive life, though sadly she is now living out the remainder of her existence in the twilight of Alzheimer’s, confined to bed and unable to work. Born in 1914 in China of Scottish parents, she came to Scotland as a baby, growing up to study music which she forsook for painting at Edinburgh College of Art in 1929. A talented student, she won a travelling award, studied with André Lhote in Paris, got to know Spain and Italy a little, before studying briefly at the Euston Road School in 1938 and marrying the writer and painter Adrian Stokes. They went to live near St Ives in Cornwall in 1939, and soon friends and refugees from the war turned up to stay: Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth (with their children) and then Naum Gabo and his wife. In this creative and social ferment, Margaret Mellis the artist reached maturity.

Colour was from the first her element (she remembered being bathed as a child in a blue-and-white china basin with dragons on it), but Nicholson and Gabo made her concentrate on structure, and think in a different way. Her work after that developed a strong constructivist leaning while maintaining a fruitful and intimate dialogue with colour. Mellis’s life moved on after the war. Her marriage to Stokes broke down, she met and married the poet Francis Davison, and they went to live in the south of France before settling in deepest Suffolk in 1950. Here they lived in a primitive though idyllic cottage near Diss, growing barley because it was subsidised and keeping hens to sell the eggs. A move to Southwold on the coast in 1976 prompted Mellis to make the first of the driftwood constructions she was to become famous for, and after Davison’s death in 1984 she entered upon an immensely productive phase which lasted until 2001. The current exhibition at UEA covers most periods of her work, but concentrates on these late and beguiling constructions.

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