Margaret Mellis

1914-

Margaret Mellis is a Painter, maker of reliefs and collages and sculptor. She was born in China of Scottish parents who moved to Britain whilst she was still an infant. She was educated in Edinburgh and attended the college of Art there from 1929 to 1933.

Her teachers included Hubert Wellington and S J Peploe. A postgraduate award and scholarship enabled her to study and travel on the continent, where she was taught in Paris by Andre Lhote.

From 1935-7 she held a fellowship at Edinburgh College of Art. She then studied at Euston Road School and in 1939 with her first husband, Adrian Stokes (she later married Francis Davison), moved to St.Ives where they became key figures in the artist’s colony.

There she was influenced by Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo and adopted a constructivist style, making reliefs, returning to painting after the war. She lived for two years from 1948 in the south of France. Returning to England in 1950 she moved  to Suffolk, settling in Southwold, where she has lived ever since. In the 1960s and 1970s she experimented with constructions and reliefs in colour. Since 1978 she has made reliefs using items found on the shoreline, especially driftwood.

The Sainsbury Centre is about to open with a highly important Exhibition of her life's work and this will see her star rise dramatically and she will become even more collectable.