Gifted with synaesthesia | Margaret Mellis at Redfern

Happy birthday to the Redfern Gallery, who are celebrating their 100th anniversary with two consecutive centenary exhibitions of paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures. The first is currently on show in their Cork Street space, where the gallery has been based since 1936 (having moved from Redfern House in Old Bond Street, hence the name).

Margaret Mellis (1914-2009), Bottles, Round Table and Sea, 1952, Oil on canvas, 76.2x50.8cm. Courtesy of The Redfern Gallery, 2023.

The great and the good from the ModBrit scene are included, of course, from Agar to Vaughan, as well as a handful of artists from abroad, such as Pablo Picasso and Antoni Tapies. But to illustrate this piece I’ve picked out a still life by Margaret Mellis, having been enchanted by a solo exhibition of the painter’s work at Towner Eastbourne a couple of years back.

Mellis was an unfairly overlooked member of the St Ives Group, who moved with her artist husband Adrian Stokes to the Cornish village of Carbis Bay just before the outbreak of WW2, soon to be joined by their friends Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth.

Mellis had been taught by the Scottish Colourist Samuel Peploe at Edinburgh College of Art in the late twenties (fellow students included William Gear and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham), and her pieces – at first, due to encouragement by her friends, mostly abstract – reflected her musical sense of colour and tone (she was a trained pianist, and gifted with synaesthesia).

Having split with Stokes, she fell in love with Francis Davis (an artist she met through Patrick and Delia Heron) and moved with him to Suffolk in 1950, having adopted a more figurative approach to her painting. This still life, from 1952, is clearly influenced by Picasso and Braque’s cubist period, but the colours are very much typical of Margaret Mellis’s exuberant palette, especially the rich blue which represents the sea.

Later in her career Mellis – who adored living on the coast – made trademark abstract montages from flotsam she found on the beach, which have since spawned many imitators. In 1986 she was approached by a student who professed a love of her work, by the name of Damien Hirst. The two became firm friends, and Hirst cites Mellis as a major influence. She died in 2009, aged 95. There are three more of her works in the Redfern show, the 1954 painting Blind Woman, and two reliefs, created in 1970 and 1971; the show runs until September 7. Redfern will be showing work by Margaret Mellis at the 2023 British Art Fair.