Houses by Moonlight, St Ives

This resonant abstraction epitomises the outburst of creativity and change of direction Mellis experienced on moving to St Ives with her husband Adrian Stokes. Although there was already a well-established colony of artists in the area, it was the arrival of Stokes and Mellis in Carbis Bay which made St Ives a focus for international modernism. Stokes invited Ben Nicholson and his new wife Barbara Hepworth to come to live with them and escape the bombs falling on London, and although it was tough for the newly-married Mellis and Stokes to have Ben and Barbara as house guests (not the most accommodating of individuals), Mellis found Ben’s company enormously stimulating. And when Naum Gabo moved into a bungalow at the end of the garden, the Mellis/Stokes home became a centre of abstract debate and creativity. Mellis, who up till then had been painting in a figurative mode, responded by making a number of resolutely abstract collages and low relief constructions, and began to experiment with painted abstract imagery too. Houses by Moonlight anticipates the abstraction that Mellis would develop in the 1970s and 80s, and offers a particularly poignant and subtle example of her work.

A.L.