|
The Transformed Total: Margaret Mellis’s
Constructions
Michael Bird
In 1978 Margaret Mellis, then in her mid-sixties, assembled some pieces
of driftwood into an ad hoc sculpture. This was the beginning of what
turned out to be a new phase in her art. Anyone could have picked up
these fragments – wave-worn plywood boards untidily snapped like
indigestible wafers, bust planks and wooden fillets that had once been
painted red, blue or green for some purpose now impossible to ascertain.
Rescued from the tideline dumping ground of leathery wrack and mangled
rope, these scraps of unvalued jetsam were shaped by whatever had
happened to happen to them. Mellis played about, arranging and
rearranging, much as friends often observed her instinctively adjust the
placing of ordinary objects – a bowl on a windowsill, a napkin and knife
on a tabletop – until they ‘looked right’. Screwed into place, the
provisional configuration became a permanent construction that could be
hung on the wall and looked at. No longer spread on the floor to be
accidentally destroyed or thrown back on the woodpile, it had crossed an
invisible line that distinguished those ephemeral still-lifes into which
Mellis conjured her domestic surroundings from the creations of her art.
‘F’ 1997 driftwood construction 148 x 145 x 6cm
Adrian Stokes, Venice c.1928
It was almost fifty years earlier that she had started out as a student
painter in the French-influenced mode of her tutors at Edinburgh College
of Art, notably the Scottish landscapist W.G.
Gillies. There followed the semi-obligatory spell Paris in1933, studying
with Gillies’s former mentor André Lhote, whose passion for Cézanne had
by that time evolved into cubistic figure paintings, then further
travels in France, North Africa, Italy and Spain, and another visit to
Paris in summer 1937. Here, at the Exposition Internationale,1 she must
have witnessed the ominously confrontational style of the Nazi German
and Soviet pavilions, and may also have seen Picasso’s Guernica in the
pavilion of the doomed Spanish Republic. She certainly took in an
exhibition of early Cézannes in the newly constructed Palais de Tokyo,
where she got into conversation with a charismatic, well-travelled
English writer of improbably eclectic interests. In retrospect, the
circumstances of this meeting were a mixed augury both for Mellis’s
future relationship with Adrian Stokes (whom she married the following
year) and for her own artistic career. Cézanne was on show as a
latter-day hero of the grand tradition of French painting, but he was
also venerated by the
Marsh Mist 1992 driftwood construction 71 x
55.3cm
Pots and Fruit c.1960 oil on hardboard 45 x 54cm
avant-garde. It took Stokes some time (and the British art public much
longer) to discover that the gamine young Scottish artist who seemed,
like him, engrossed by classic painterly questions of colour and form,
also had it in her to play a very different kind of game.
If it was hard to be sure before then, it became clear around 1940 that
Mellis was decidedly not going to spend the rest of her life producing
pleasantly derivative homages to Gillies, Lhote or Cézanne. Now living
in Cornwall, with the war on and, after the birth of her son Telfer in
1940, a child to care for, she nevertheless managed to create her first
wholly distinctive body of work – a sporadic yet somehow confident and
complete series of abstract paper collages that counts among the most
vivid, unusual work to come out of St Ives during the war. Some were
included in a popular 1942 exhibition in London, New Movements in Art
(which in the event proved a false dawn for progressive abstract art in
Britain), but professionally they got Mellis nowhere. Divorce from
Stokes; a new marriage, to the painter Francis Davison (whose own career
seemed to demand precedence from
Collage
with Red Triangle 1940 paper collage 29.5 x 23cm Private Collection
Margaret
Mellis (right) and Francis Davison, Cannes 1948
then on); a move to southern France, well out of the London gallery
orbit – all this cut across a steady career trajectory, although Mellis
continued to work and exhibit. At various times between 1950 and 1980,
she produced abstract paintings in the crypto-figurative postwar
landscape style; spare, intense flower paintings; interestingly shaped
pastel drawings on splayed envelopes; more abstract works, this time in
the flat, hard-edge manner fashionable in the 1960s. A few of these
pieces found their way into public collections. On the whole, though,
Mellis’s loyal critics and collectors belonged to one of those secret
confraternities to whom an artist’s voice speaks clear and compelling
long before it gets pumped through the PA system of a public reputation.
I don’t know that in 1978 even they would have guessed that her next
body of work – the largest, longest sustained and, in her view, the best
of her career 2 – was about to emerge from a stack of driftwood that fed
the fire in the cottage in Southwold, Suffolk, to which she and Davison
had moved two years earlier.
above top: Floating Tree 1958 oil on board 71 x 91cm
Private Collection above: White Relief 1970 painted wood mounted on
hardboard 37.7 x 37.7cm
above: Dying Poppies 1987 pastel and chalk on grey envelope 24 x 22.5cm
Purple Anenomies in Sky Blue 1988 pastel and chalk on coloured envelope
36 x 25.5cm
above top: Trees on the Shore 1958 oil on essex board 71 x 92cm Private
Collection above: Half in Half c.1970/71 painted wood mounted on
hardboard 58.4 x 58.4cm
Detail of studio
For some time Mellis had been in the habit of gleaning firewood during
walks along the shore or in the country (she had been living in Suffolk
since 1950). Once she began to think of the domestic woodpile not as
free fuel but as a treasury of unique objets trouvés, however, it became
impossible simply to burn it. The stack in the studio grew. In 1979 two
more driftwood reliefs came out of it; in 1980 ‘a great spate of them’.
3 The series continued for more than twenty years. Judging by their
titles, Mellis sometimes thought of her constructions as purely abstract
formations of shape and vivid colour (Rust and Yellow, 1990), sometimes
as figures or scenes that inexplicably ‘emerged’ from her intuitive
process (Evening Walk, 1986), and occasionally as semi-representational
icons (3 Saints, 1987–89) that she fashioned with the involuntary
artifice of a sleepwalking toymaker.
Three Saints 1987/99 driftwood construction 48.5
x 42.3 x 4.5cm
Margaret Mellis aged 16, 1930 Margaret Mellis c.1932
Surrealism is almost a century old, but we still often read found
objects in a surrealistic spirit, as though they gave physical form to
the workings of our own minds. The sudden collision of chance and
recognition is so satisfying because, in good surrealistic style, it
feels like a link snapping into place as the unconscious greets itself
in the external world. Where did Margaret Mellis, daughter of a
Presbyterian missionary and student of serious, respectable Scottish
fauves, learn to respond in this way? It could well have been in Paris,
where she must have known something of what Breton, Picasso, Ernst,
Duchamp and Man Ray, among others, were up to in the 1930s. Or even
through the imprint of Stokes’s forceful personality. Although, as an
authority on Italian Renaissance art, he felt little enthusiasm for such
anarchic modern phenomena as Dada or Surrealism, this was more than
compensated for by his body-and-soul immersion in psychoanalytic theory.
Wherever her instinct for passive intentionality in art, for the artist
as simultaneous maker and medium, came from, she could hardly have
Marine City driftwood construction 64.8 x 64.8 x
7cm
expressed it more clearly in a description she wrote in March 1990 of
the genesis of her construction Bogman (1990):
‘I found a boat skeleton in the marsh. It was half underwater, but
not rotted. The dark blue paint was cracked & curling off it … I laid it
down on the studio floor … almost without touching them bits of wood
came out of my wood pile & lay down on the broken bones, leaving little
gaps & splits of different shapes & sizes.’5
After several months, during which, while she worked on the piece for
two or three hours every day, it also ‘got kicked out of shape at least
twenty times’, the moment came when, ‘I knew exactly where each bit had
to go. There was no choice … They couldn’t wait another minute.’ This
final session lasted five and a half hours; then, as she lifted the
completed construction off the floor to view it properly, ‘I got quite a
surprise to see that I had a kind of man there. Later, I realised he was
a Bog Man’. She did not know when she started that this strange figure
would materialise, with his broken bones, his look of having been
‘impaled on a plank
Bogman Jan-March 1990 driftwood construction 176.5 x
49 x 5.5cm
which had become part of his body’. Five years later, Mellis was still
describing the creation of her constructions in similar terms: ‘I work
as if I were making an abstract construction’, but then, ‘Something
begins to happen by itself … When I start putting pieces of wood
together, I am aware only of how the shapes and colour relate. I have no
idea of what may happen on the way, or at the end.’ 6 In almost all
Mellis’s statements about her constructions, they are said to have
‘emerged’ – unplanned, unprepared-for.
Although Mellis discovered that her driftwood constructions delivered
their final ‘surprise’ through a process very close to Surrealist
automatism, I don’t want to make too much of their kinship to such works
as Hans Arp’s painted wooden relief The Entombment of Birds and
Butterflies (1916–17) or the assemblages to which Kurt Schwitters gave
the name Merz, or even, in their flayed surfaces, to the paint effects
achieved by Max Ernst’s technique of decalcomania. By the early 1970s
she was certainly aware of Schwitters’s work, which she saw in London
around that time in Philip Granville’s collection at Lord’s Gallery. Her
habits of hoarding all sorts of
Nine 1980 driftwood construction 39.4 x 43.2cm
Ten 1980
driftwood construction 76.5 x 45.7cm
Thirty Six
1983 driftwood construction 64 x 55 x 7cm
chance finds, of garnering even kitchen waste as potential material for
art, were, however, already well-formed; as an inspired magpie,
Schwitters struck her less as a revelation than as a man after her own
heart. And in terms of colour, in any case, she liked things much
stronger than most of the pioneers of collage and assemblage: Picasso,
Braque, Arp, Schwitters – their excisions from the workaday world
generally stuck to the café tones of scrubbed wood floors, varnished
tabletops, smoky wallpaper, thumbed newsprint. Running deeper, in fact,
than any such influence in the use of found objects or assemblage, was
Mellis’s instinct for, and pleasure in, a certain approach to creating
visual arrangements and orchestrations of colour that was current in
1930s’ Paris but which never quite took root in British art.
Early on, the nature of her personal and artistic relationships to other
members of the 1930s London avant-garde revealed her individuality. No
sooner had Margaret and Adrian moved in April 1939 to Little Parc Owles,
a large house overlooking the sea near St Ives, than a steady stream of
house guests began to turn up – sculptors, painters, writers – a
roll-call
Nineteen 1980 driftwood construction 35 x 68.6cm
Margaret Mellis, Telfer (on right) with Miriam and Nina Gabo
Britain’s modern cultural elite, among whom Stokes was one of the
best-connected men of his day. In August, shortly before war was
declared, Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and their young triplets
arrived (then stayed for three months), to be followed by the refugee
Russian Constructivist sculptor Naum Gabo and his wife Miriam, who
rented a seaside bungalow near by. Margaret, who was much younger than
Adrian and most of his artist associates, may have taken a ringside seat
as they continued their high-octane Hampstead conversations into the
Cornish autumn, but Nicholson – habitually generous, at least where
junior artists were concerned – encouraged her to get on with some art
of her own. The unremittingly persuasive Gabo, meanwhile, was already
cutting, bending and pasting little maquettes that embodied his ideas of
‘dynamic’ space, modest cardboard tokens of the inevitable dawning of a
world-encompassing Constructivist future. Mellis’s first collage,
elegant and restrained as a Nicholson still-life, coolly geometric as a
Gabo construction, nevertheless reveals the sensibility that set her
apart from the rest of the Little Parc Owles crowd.
FRAIS 1995 driftwood construction 41 x 58 x 7cm
3rd Collage July 1940 mixed media on card 26 x 33cm Private Collection
Humour, or at least a pervasive ‘charm and lightness’, is part of it.
Dated July 1940, 1st Collage contains a small,
upended white rectangle on which the word VALUE is printed in capital
letters. Whether or not she deliberately intended it this way, the idea
of value as a pasted-on snippet offers both welcome relief from, and a
challenging antidote to, the earnest atmosphere in which discussion of
art took place chez Stokes. From the same month, Mellis’s 3rd Collage
contains a fragment of crossword puzzle; the blank squares within the
square suggest, perhaps, that anyone wanting to determine the meaning of
this piece will have both to seek the clues and to find the answers
themselves. There’s an element of play – of teasing, even – in her
choice of mind-game material, since its reason for being where it is in
the collage lies not in its intellectual content but in its ‘intuitive
placement’ 8 in relation to an opaque black rectangle containing a
scissored white disc, a minute white triangle and a squarish yellow
rectangle within a circle within a rectangle of grainy brown.
Whip (untitled) driftwood construction 76.2 x 61.2
x 5cm
Alongside charm and lightness, there were other ways in which Mellis’s
little collages announced their independence of the milieu in which they
were made – ways that Stokes might well have found hard to accept. One
of his personal theories was that all art could be categorised as either
carving or modelling. Even painters could be carving artists, if their
work involved bringing some latent reality to the surface, a process of
disclosure rather than accretion. Modelling, by contrast, meant laying
on paint or piling up clay, for example, to construct objects that,
however impressive in themselves, could essentially never be more than
surrogates. Mellis’s collages sailed debonairly through a gap in
Stokes’s thinking: their active principle involved neither carving nor
modelling but was based on arrangement, moving the elements of an image
around until she hit on an unforeseen ‘rightness’. This wasn’t the way
most British artists worked, including Nicholson and Hepworth. While
they hugely admired Mondrian’s simplification and control of the visual
surface, their own respective practices remained grounded in a belief in
the virtues of shaping their materials by hand, religiously
In the
Night 1993 driftwood construction 74 x 90.5 x 7.5cm
rubbing, sanding, scraping, carving, colouring. Hepworth in particular
talked about art as if it were a transcendental form of manual labour.
In Paris, on the other hand, artists of very different persuasions
shared a fixation on the nature of the organised surface. In their early
experiments with collage before the First World War, Picasso and Braque
realised that raw material could be captured directly from the texture
of daily life and redeployed it as art, not through traditional artistic
techniques but as a result of the way it was arranged. For his part,
Matisse moved discrete areas of painted colour around on canvas, pushed
the charcoal lines in his drawings this way and that, in devoted pursuit
of the ‘art of arranging’. 9 From her encounters with modern art in
France, Mellis either learned or found that she already shared a similar
delight in ‘arranging’. Her 1940s’ collages, so often said to be
indebted to Gabo’s Constructivism, were in essence nothing like. Gabo
believed that there were strict limitations to what could be achieved on
a flat surface (he had a running dispute with Mondrian on this point).
He
Scarlet Undercurrent Nov 2001 driftwood construction
198.3 x 94 x 10cm
Blue, Green, Red and Pink Collage 1941 mixed media on card 24 x 16cm
Private Collection
had little interest in two-dimensional collage, and would never have
done as Mellis did in using the green and white label from a bottle of
‘Dettolin Gargle’ mouthwash as a circular motif in an otherwise pure
abstract design.
The Dettolin label in Blue, Green, Red and Pink Collage (1941)
represents more than a serendipitously geometric, coloured shape plucked
from obscurity to become abstract art. Redolent of unidealised
domesticity – bathroom cabinets, tooth mugs, shopping lists – it is a
found object that (we can guess) would have slipped beneath either
Stokes’s or Gabo’s intellectual radar but to which Mellis’s gaze was
alert. Nicholson would possibly have enjoyed this touch; but then again,
the ordinary objects in which he took visual delight tended to be more
conventionally either tasteful or toylike – a patterned jug, a striped
fishing-float, a playing card. In the late 1930s Nicholson occasionally
designed adverts, but he kept this side of his work separate
Sinking
Boat 1989 driftwood construction 61 x 43 x 3cm
Cucu (reworked) 2001 driftwood construction 38 x 41 x 10cm
from his serious abstract paintings and reliefs. Ensconced as she was
within Britain’s modernist inner circle, but also trying to run a home,
Mellis saw no reason why household product design and pure abstract art
shouldn’t share the same sheet of paper. The impulse that later led her
to make constructions out of miscellaneous lumps of driftwood was the
same that spurred her to introduce a mouthwash label, a square of brown
parcel paper or the badge from Sobranie cigarette box into her collages.
Far more than the influence of Nicholson or Gabo, it is the spirit of
Alfred Wallis that can be felt in both the early and late phases of
Mellis’s work. While modernist intellectuals praised and patronised the
elderly self-taught painter, Mellis seems intuitively to have empathised
with Wallis’s own feelings about his art – how, when he painted on
discarded packing crates, Quaker Oats boxes, any old scrap he could
find, an inner world of Bible stories, memories of seaports and paranoid
fantasies emerged in the guise of full-rigged ships, spectral fish or
startled house-fronts whose totemic strangeness belied the epithet
‘childlike’. In a phrase that
Toy Cupboard (Thirty) 1983 driftwood construction
54.6 x 59 x 14.6cm
could apply to Wallis himself, Mellis’s long-time friend and supporter
Douglas Hall described her ‘alchemist’s ability to transmute base
material into fine art’. He detected a further, moral, dimension to her
constructions (in its way as foreign to modernist ideals as Wallis’s
atavistic Puritanism), which he identified as a ‘passion to save and
raise up the rejected’.10 Whether or not her art has a redemptive motive
of this kind, it is an art in which the strictest canons of
modernist-abstract taste manage to coexist with an equally forthright
but utterly un-modernist negation of hierarchy. This paradox is one of
the features that, confronting the fantastic jumble sale of objets
trouvés, art brut, assemblages and installation pieces with which the
pages of late twentieth-century art history are heaped, clears a space
for Mellis’s constructions that is entirely their own.
Another feature is her distinctive response to found material, which
seizes not so much to the objecthood of chance finds as on found colour.
Rust and Yellow (1990), for example, could be imagined reprised in
muted, salt-scrubbed tones; it would still be a substantial piece, but
it
Rust &
Yellow 1990 driftwood construction 89 x 110 x 10.8cm
would lose most of its point. The movement in the top left-hand section,
from bare wood to brown paint to yellow then red draws intensity from
the colours’ interaction in a way that recalls Mellis’s ardent
admiration for Matisse. It aligns her with the most Francophile of the
postwar St Ives generation: Heron, whom she thought perhaps too
fastidious, and Hilton, whose fierce mediation between license and
simplicity got results that appealed to her. In Bottom of the Deep Blue
Sea (1996/97), while the sections of blue-, white- and green-painted
marine plywood are again configured like a abstract painting – in their
blowtorch jaggedness closer to Clyfford Still, perhaps, than Heron or
Hilton – much of the colour’s vitality derives from the fact that it is
not laid on deliberately but instead orchestrates the effects of chance.
If, as Bonnard insisted, an artist’s real worth lies in the quality of
their looking rather than their skill with a brush, by leaving paints
and brushes to one side and using found colour, Mellis asks us not to
admire what she has made but to see what she’s seen.
Bottom
of the Deep Blue Sea 1996/97 driftwood construction 88.4 x 106 x 6cm
The torn-looking patches in Bottom of the Deep Blue Sea or ‘F’ (1997) or
Through the Window (1990), where the wood grain beneath the paint is
exposed, echo the look of ripped posters on a wall, reminding us that
these surfaces consist not only of forms and colours but also of
physical depth and texture. We sense, too, the action of time. The work
of art has its history, but its constituent parts have histories of
their own – they have already been something else (or several things – a
tree, a boat, a wreck). Put together by Mellis, usually with no, or
minimal, further intervention, they have not entirely shed their former
lives. Here some part that had once been nailed or glued to a board has
dropped off, leaving its grainy shadow; here are the tiny stigmata left
by screws, nails, drill holes. If I had to explain why I find it harder
to take my eyes from these scarred, peeling remnants than from intact,
highly finished surfaces, I would hazard that it has to do with a kind
of
Through the
Window 1990 driftwood construction 57 x 44 x 3cm
illogical narrative expectancy – if bits of driftwood, as Mellis seems
to have felt, could tell her where they belonged in a construction,
surely they can (if we stare for long enough) reveal their meaning. Or
is it that Mellis’s layering of surfaces and signs feels almost
photographically compelling, as when a camera picks up texture in such
detail that it ghosts the effect of touch? After the finding, searching
and emerging had all taken place, she referred to her finished
constructions as a ‘transformed total’. I would change the tense here to
a present participle, since, even as you look at these works, the
transforming seems still to be underway. It is as if, though all the
pieces have fallen into place, the hands of the clock have not stopped.
January 2008
Rising Deep 2001 driftwood construction 116 x 55 x
10cm
Margaret with her son Telfer and grandson Laurie, Walberswick Ferry
c.1987
NOTES
1 The full title was Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques
Appliqués
à la Vie Moderne.
2 As reported by Douglas Hall in a talk given at the Aldeburgh Festival
in
June 1991 (‘Margaret Mellis: Abstraction, Creation and Intuition’,
unpublished typescript, pp.10–11).
3 Margaret Mellis, ‘Driftwood Reliefs’, unpublished typescript, dated 13
January 1990.
4 Douglas Hall has described the humanoid paddle shape that appears in
some of these constructions as ‘an apt symbol for the soul’, a ‘perfect
little
icon of contemplation and hope’ (1991, p.13).
5 Margaret Mellis, ‘Bog Man’, handwritten statement dated 14 March 1990.
6 Margaret Mellis, statement dated April 1995.
7 The phrase is Mel Gooding’s (‘A Love of What Is Real: The Art of
Margaret
Mellis’, introduction to Margaret Mellis: A Retrospective, exh. cat.,
City Art
Centre, Edinburgh; Kapil Jariwali, London, 1997; The Pier Gallery,
Stromness, 1998, n.p.).
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Hall, 1991, p.2.
Article appears courtesy of
Austin/Desmond Fine Art www.austindesmond.com
Essay by Michael Bird was written to coincide with an exhibition curated by Catriona Colledge
and David Archer in January 2008. Photography by Colin Mills.
Michael Bird is author of
'The St Ives artists: biography of Place and Time' and 'Sandra Blow'
both available through the artcornwall shopfront:
See interviews page for
video clips from Margaret Mellis: A life in Colour
|
