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Green Pebble Magazine
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Articles> Margaret Mellis
It is 1939.
A young Margaret Mellis has been hoisted up the side of a power station chimney
in a small rope cradle. Below her, three of Britain’s most promising
modernist artists belay her as she paints camouflage onto the brick. It is,
in Margaret’s own words, a ‘windy and shouty’ day in Cornwall,
and she will return home with burnt knees, but Europe is at war and the group
of friends – all founding members of what will later be the St Ives
Group – are anxious to contribute to the war effort.
‘As an artist, it was a good exercise in finding out how light works,’
says Margaret’s son, Telfer Stokes, himself an artist with studios in
Suffolk. ‘When the sun was shining, was the camouflage working or wasn’t
it working? It wasn’t as if anyone asked them to do it. Barbara Hepworth
asked the power station manager if he would like to have his chimneys camouflaged,
he said yes, and off they went and did it. It was an end-of-world scenario,
it was all about what they could do for their country.’
The real question, Telfer says, ‘is how did those totally argumentative,
impossible people, do something together?’
For insight into the hows and wherefores of those early days in St Ives, the
recently launched documentary film, Margaret Mellis, A Life in Colour, provides
a tapestry of understated, thought-provoking clues.
Because the film’s soundtrack consists entirely of extracts from Margaret’s
own writings and diary entries, augmented by recordings of interviews held
by the British Library Sound Archive’s Artists’ Lives collection,
the film layers together – much as Margaret herself layered collages
and reliefs – a gentle, moving account of her life, unfiltered by art
historians and analysts.
Through these accounts Margaret emerges as a young talented artist who, upon
graduating from Edinburgh College of Art in the late 1920’s, travels
through Europe on a scholarship; arrives as a newly wed in St Ives under the
specter of impending war; joins a group of artists in their endeavours to
camouflage four giant chimneys (sadly, but unsurprisingly, Margaret’s
blistered knees were in vain, the project did not succeed; the chimneys remained
visible); and as a wife and mother, cautiously balances her artistic needs
with the needs of her husband, son, guests and community under conditions
that were often crowded and difficult.
Eventually Margaret and her first husband, writer Adrian Stokes, would separate
and leave St Ives, but not before Margaret had lived and breathed several
years of constructivist and modernist ideologies as advocated by her friends
and neighbours, artist Ben Nicholson and sculptor Naum Gabo.
It was thanks to their influence that she would produce a body of work which
has been heralded as a superb example of the St Ives branch of British modernism.
However, it was thanks to Margaret’s unwavering faith in her own intuition
and understanding of colour, that she would determinedly produce works that
were uniquely her own: quirky, witty, seemingly careless pieces which were,
according to her friend and archivist, Emily Whalley, ‘something so
compelling that you are transfixed to look hard and remember it long afterwards’.
This is only a small part of the article
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