Margaret Mellis (1914 – 2009)

Biography: Margaret Mellis studied at Edinburgh College of Art (1930-1934) under Samuel Peploe and William Gillies. She used a travel scholarship to study with André Lhote in Paris and also attended classes at the Euston School in London. With her first husband Adrian Stokes in the late 1930s she moved to St Ives, where friends such as Barbara Hepworth and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham joined them during the war, as part of the new artists’ colony there. Hepworth’s husband Ben Nicholson encouraged Mellis’s move into abstraction. When her marriage broke down however she moved away and later lived in Norfolk with second husband and artist Francis Davison. At first after Mellis left St Ives, she returned to representational painting, but by the mid 50s her work was becoming increasingly abstract. After a move to Southwold in 1976 she began to create driftwood sculptures. According to an obituarist, Mellis and Davison ‘journeyed into abstraction along personal but parallel routes’.