£5,750
Contemporary & Post-War Art | 595
Auction: 16 April 2020 at 12:00 BST
Signed, titled and dated verso, oil on canvas laid on board
Provenance: Purchased directly from the artist, by the vendor.
Biography: Mellis was born in China to Scottish parents and moved to Britain when she was one year old and shortly after the First World War broke out.
She studied at Edinburgh College of Art under the tutelage of S. J. Peploe alongside classmates Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and William Gear, and won a scholarship in 1933 to study in Paris.
In 1939, Mellis moved to St Ives with her husband, the writer Adrian Stokes. There, she became a member of the St Ives group of artists and an important figure in the growing modernist movement. It was here that Mellis began to produce collages and constructions of plywood, driftwood and found objects, as well as small abstract paintings. In the 1960s and 1970s she continued experimenting with these constructions and reliefs, working with colour. Mellis left the St Ives area in 1946 after the breakdown of her marriage and subsequent divorce.
She later married Francis Davison, also an artist, and became a mentor to the young Damien Hirst.