by Roger Deakin
Mary generally places her paintings on the floor and sits on a low stool, bending over them to work. This accounts for the close focus. Sometimes the picture is propped against the wall, and she uses a small step that enables her almost to walk right into the work. At one point in the diary, she describes herself as ‘so tired I almost fell into the canvas’. Unlike most artists, Mary keeps not a sketchbook but a notebook or diary. She fills it with handwritten thoughts and observations that often find their way into the work verbatim. ‘Be sure to put it down,’ she writes in one diary entry, ‘be it squirrel in a woodpile, men with white-toed boots working on a mountain railway, caterpillars hanging stiffly and staring from a laurel bush, the magnitude of the stars – there is no end.’ That reference to the stars inevitably suggests one of the best-known Newcomb pictures, the beautiful watercolour Ewes Watching Shooting Stars: three ewes on a clear, cold night, invite you to identify with the animals inside their warm coats. The painting reminds me of Ted Hughes’s poem ‘The Warm and the Cold’, an evocation of the animal world on a freezing, starry night in terms of the particular form of shelter each one takes, including, by contrast, the ‘sweating farmers’ who ‘Turn in their sleep/Like oxen on spits’. Newcomb and Hughes share an acute awareness of the minutiae of life in the wild, and a deep, affectionate understanding of the lives of farm animals and all creatures. In another picture, Very Cold Birds Where One has Flown Away it Knocked the Raindrops Off, the raindrops are drawn very nearly as big as the birds on a tree, so the three drops in mid fall suggest the absent bird. Proportion is very often skewed like this in a way reminiscent of children’s art or ‘naive’ painting, in order to represent the thing that looms large in the artist’s mind at a particular moment.
Years before she eventually began to write in a series of red-bound diaries from W. H. Smith’s, Mary instinctively preferred writing or drawing on separate sheets of a favourite A5 paper, torn from a book and carefully kept in the folder she carried with her. She was well aware that this was the medium that best suited her mode of thought and sudden, crystalline perceptions. To write in a notebook or diary implies a burden of narrative, of things unfolding in sequence through time, which Mary was temperamentally reluctant to take on. Entering one of her paintings, like entering a wood, alters your sense of time. The act of drawing, as John Berger points out in a recent interview, ‘is a way of learning to leave the present, or rather, of gathering the past, the future and the present into one’.
At the head of a jotted list of projected ideas, Mary writes, ‘The lady in her landscape, her rightness, her industry, her involvement, respect and pride.’ It has the ring of a self-portrait. There is a certainty about Mary Newcomb that includes an absolute belief in the importance of the clear-sighted moments that engender her paintings. The impression you often have, looking at one of her paintings, is that ‘Suddenly there it was, and Mary painted it.’ But, in fact, each painting evolves slowly in the studio. Mary paints a first version, blocking out the main elements, then stands it against the wall. Over a period of weeks or months she will then begin to tear out bits of colour or texture that catch her eye in magazines and arrange them on the floor beside each picture. As we move through the house we step carefully around these pools of colour.
At the end of each day’s work Mary also paints out all her brushes on to pieces of hardboard and stands them near the painting in progress. ‘Just now I’m still stuck on green,’ she says. A particular colour will preoccupy her for weeks, and the painting out of the brushes is much more than ‘a good way to use up spare paint’, as she deceptively claims. It is the gradual preparation of the underpainting that gives the pictures such depth and mystery, and often pushes them to the edge of abstraction. Turner did something similar in his ‘colour beginnings’. It is the most profoundly unconscious part of the painting: the music of the song. I notice a predominantly blue work from an earlier phase, a back view of two figures sitting in the garden. Mary often paints people from behind, perhaps shyly, in a way that suggests that they too are lost in their own private worlds. Another example hangs across the room: three female figures leaning over the railings of Southwold Pier, looking out across a sparkling sea with a pair of distant sailing ships on the horizon. One wears a black-and-white harlequin-patterned dress. Wind catches her hair.
The people in these paintings seem to be part of the landscape. They do not dominate it, but take their place in it like any other being. Mary’s Man Cycling Madly Down a Hill seems airborne on his bicycle in an abstract ‘green shade’, his arms and elbows akimbo over the handlebars like wings, cloth-capped head leaning forward like a bird’s. Mary’s men often appear in the cloth caps worn by Suffolk farm labourers or fishermen until recently: a badge of belonging to the land or sea. These anonymous figures are in some ways Green Men, emerging through deep layers of foliage. The just-visible Lady in an Unsprayed Field Seen in Passing, an after-image, might be a corn spirit. Mary Newcomb seems attracted to paint what is half hidden, invisible even. In The Last Bird Home, the small figure of the bird, in a slight halo of warm amber dusk light, descends into a long smudge of dark-grey hedge we know is crowded with concealed birds, all singing. ‘After a long wet evening,’ Mary wrote while she was working on this picture, ‘the birds must sing. They have to get it out and shout insistently.’ Birds are everywhere in the work, yet they are often half concealed, hard to spot, as in a wood or a hedge. A cock pheasant in a field is actually a half pheasant submerged in grass, and in the diary there is a reference to ‘half men’ as subjects for pictures: ‘half men in hollows, in fields, in dips in the road, in long grass’. This is how it is in the fields, hedges and woods: things heard but unseen, or glimpsed, partly hidden. Seen collectively as hedgerow or wood, trees are abstracted by nature into a mass of colour and texture. The experience is distinct from the architectural look of a single tree. And this is what you see in a Newcomb painting.
Driftwood
The three of us – Margaret Mellis, her son Telfer Stokes and I – have climbed two flights of steep, bare pine stairs to Margaret’s top-floor studio. Catching our breath, we peer out through a pair of sash windows into the dullness of an afternoon sea mist at Southwold. Borne on the coastal currents of the North Sea, where Margaret used to swim every day until well into her eighties, fresh shoals of flotsam are homing towards the beach. In the room, a scree of driftwood tumbles down from the picture rail at one corner. Margaret, diminutive and always notably young-looking, is in her nineties. She often used to sleep in the studio and now sits on the single bed, contemplating the flotsam tide that advances across the paint-spattered hardboard floor. In another corner, her various tools are laid out: hand drill, electric drill, screwdrivers, hammers and pliers. Jam jars of brushes, screws and nails, boxes of oil paints and sketchbooks cover a table.
Margaret’s driftwood constructions are hung on nails and screws artlessly driven into the walls: collages or ‘assemblages’ of assorted shapes and fragments, bleached, pickled, painted, battered or frayed by the action of the waves and shingle. These are the disembodied components of things – chairs, boats, tables, herring boxes – reassembled into abstract forms. They lie somewhere between painting and sculpture, between two dimensions and three. Driftwood is full of the tonal colour and depth of years of flaked or peeling paint, half revealing a deep strata of soft pigments from generations of painters and decorators. Dozens of unknown craftsmen and artisans have unwittingly contributed to these works. They are collections of silent stories. Each piece of driftwood carries its own secret history that begins with the seed of the unknown tree it came from, continues with its life as part of something made and nears its end with a voyage across the sea, perhaps halfway round the world over many years. All this information is compressed into each assemblage, the more potent for being a complete mystery. Every fragment of driftwood carries the history of a past life, so there is inevitably an element of rescue about Mellis’s work. She takes what is ‘washed up’, disjointe
d, apparently finished, and resurrects it.
Although essentially abstract, there is often a hint of the figurative about a composition like Marsh Music, hung halfway down the stairs, an accidental rudder shape that might be a bittern’s upstretched neck and beak among the reeds, or the last of a skeletal wherry stranded and half sunk in mud. Jungle Paradise, at the end of the corridor outside the kitchen, ripples out like the grain of a tree in a series of tall, thin wooden strips, each one a different shade of red or rust. At its centre is a deeply grained, half-charred oblong of Columbian pine suggestive of a human figure crowned with torn shreds of blue and yellow plywood like feathers. The playful spirit of Picasso and his own early assemblages presides over much of Mellis’s work. On the landing, she has set the sprung-open back of a bentwood chair upside-down to represent the horns on a bull’s head.
Most of the constructions are more purely abstract, and Mellis has sometimes applied paint here and there herself, as in the palette-like Sea, in which a whole range of different blues is set against patches of red and the grain of natural wood. The patina, the visual feel of the wood, varies all over this work. Often, the found wood is selected for the figure of its grain, as in Fisherman, in which a slender crescent of sea-bleached pine suggests moving water or waves. The strength of the work is its ingenious composition of colour, texture and form, all improvised in a lively, playful spirit. It is wood jazz.
There are no carpets in the house, and the white-painted floorboards, worn bare in all the most-trodden places, communicate exactly the same feeling of human use and habit over time as animal tracks, a footpath, a dished doorstep, a child’s painted wooden bricks or the driftwood on the walls. Margaret has made the whole house an installation. As you go through the front door, a dado rail on the left of the hall and corridor leads you to the kitchen with an unbroken line of beach pebbles along its ledge. On the kitchen wall a large homemade calendar says ‘Today is Monday’ and gives the date. Ironically, in this house adrift on lost memories, Alzheimer’s has come to live with Margaret Mellis too, and she now needs constant care.
Everyone in Southwold used to bring the driftwood harvest of their beach walks to Margaret’s doorstep, leaving it in the front garden for her. The best of it would find its way upstairs to the studio, where Margaret separated the painted from the natural wood, the former bleached and muted by the sun, the latter chamfered, flayed or shattered by the sea. As one accustomed to living by the sea, Margaret Mellis had always been in the habit of collecting driftwood for the fire. One winter’s night, about to place another spar in the flames, she hesitated, recognizing its individual beauty, and set it to one side. The moment of reprieve was the seed of her work with driftwood.
Telfer, himself an artist and sculptor, is the son of Adrian Stokes, whom Margaret Mellis met at a Cézanne exhibition in Paris in 1936 when she was twenty-two. They married two years later. She had studied at the Edinburgh School of Art. Stokes, who was twelve years older, had already established himself as an influential art critic and writer, and was now turning to painting. When war broke out, he and Mellis moved to Cornwall to live on Carbis Bay near St Ives, close to their friends Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. Naum Gabo and Peter Lanyon soon joined them, and so did a stream of visitors who included Graham Sutherland, Victor Pasmore and William Coldstream. Ben Nicholson encouraged Mellis to make her early abstract compositions, although she had already begun to make small-scale ‘constructivist’ collages, perhaps influenced by Gabo. But it was in St Ives that she met an artist who was to leave a deep impression on them all: Alfred Wallis, the local fisherman she and the Nicholsons discovered painting seascapes and boats on odd pieces of cardboard at his cottage.
After the war, the marriage broke up, and in 1948 Mellis married the painter Francis Davison. They moved to the South of France, where they lived for three years in a half-ruined château at Cap D’Antibes before returning to live in Suffolk at the beginning of the 1950s. A fine collage by Davison hangs above the mantelpiece in Margaret’s living room, and another on the kitchen wall, surrounded by pink artificial flowers, beside a dark-blue Aga. It wasn’t until 1978 that Margaret Mellis began making her driftwood reliefs, at least partly influenced by Francis Davison and his collages. But from the mid fifties she made a series of over seventy coloured pastel drawings of flowers on opened-out envelopes. The envelope drawings prefigure the driftwood assemblages: letters, like driftwood and ideas, arrive out of the blue. They are gifts. The envelopes, like the driftwood, had a former life, and would generally be discarded. Mellis gives them new status and a function. Ingeniously reusing an envelope, or driftwood, to make a picture is, in the context of environmental politics, a deliberately frugal act. Both were once trees, and what would otherwise have been wasted is turned to good use.
To say all this is to suggest that there is something strongly conceptual about Margaret Mellis’s work. It would be perverse to ignore her choice of such deliberately unconventional materials as envelopes and driftwood. Damien Hirst noticed this when he met Margaret Mellis early in his career, even before art school. He had been impressed by an exhibition of Francis Davison’s collages at the Hayward Gallery and wrote to her as his widow to find out more about him. Her own show at the Redfern Gallery then inspired him so much he ended up on a train to Southwold, where he stayed the weekend with Mellis, swam in the sea with her and admired more of her work.
As a sea creature herself, in that she was a regular swimmer, Margaret Mellis felt a natural affinity with driftwood. She took part in its life and knew what it was to float in the tidal currents off the Suffolk coast. Over time, water imparts an abstract quality to wood by sculpting away its inessential, softer parts, emphasizing the sinews of grain until the knots stand out like inset pebbles. Driftwood maps the movement of water around it in its own grain.
You find driftwood in rivers as well as in the sea. The spar of slender oak heartwood that now hangs on the beam above my fireplace comes from the Rhinnog Mountains of Wales above Harlech. I found it cast into a stream, which had combed and etched its grain into relief, bleaching it pale grey. It is like the sloughed skin of a snake. Perhaps it was a stake riven by the hedger’s billhook. I imagine the knee of a hollowed knot halfway along it deflecting the current, making an eddy, a little aquatic sheep-space in which a miller’s thumb might hunker down, all gills and pectoral fins and wide, ugly mouth. This fragment of stream flotsam, elevated to the status of a modest totem above the hearth, is a kind of story-stick. I can only guess at the first half of its life. The hollow knot tells me that a fair-sized branch once grew away from the tree. Somebody coppiced it. Its cleaving implies long service in a hedge or fence, and its bleached erosion says it lay for several years wedged in the gravel bed of the stream until the day I noticed it. Hot from an uphill hike one sunny morning after rain, I bathed in a tiny pool and threaded the wet sliver of wood through the flap of my rucksack like a yoke, carrying it all day and the next until I returned to my car and laid it on the back seat like a sleeping child.
More of this half-dissolved wood lives beside me on my desk. One talisman is a ring of olive like a wreath, a tough hollowed knot carved to fine filigree inside by sea creatures. I found it on a beach in Lesbos. Another is a pine Japanese prayer sandal washed up on a beach on Hokkaido with dozens of others, where all the wooden prayer sandals of Japan seem to drift eventually. There is a custom among the monks on a certain island in Japan of an initiation in which the novice lies in a wooden box made specially for the purpose and is launched on the tidal rips. The currents may take him out to sea and he will never be seen again, or they may carry him on a circular voyage that will bring him back to the shore. So the box may be a boat or a coffin, a way towards a new life or straight to death by exposure or drowning. The novice consents to be human driftwood. The sandal on my desk might have belonged to such an initiate, stepping out of it on the beach as he embarked on his uncertain voyage, but its true story will always be a mystery. It is carved from a sing
le piece of pine, with three drilled eyes that once held the thongs, and a pair of ridged platforms to raise the foot above the mud. Sea and sand have worn the sole to little more than the thickness of a book cover, reducing it to an abstract embodiment of Japanese simplicity.
I hear the story of the monk over dinner with Roger Ackling and his wife Sylvia, who live a mile or two inland from the coast of north Norfolk. Roger has often worked with driftwood. The sandal was a present from Sylvia, who mounted an exhibition of flotsam temple shoes on Hokkaido a few years ago. Until the encroaching North Sea drove them out, the Acklings lived yards away from it in the old coastguard station at Weybourne. The sea brought the flotsam and jetsam straight to the studio, although Ackling makes his work out of doors. He draws by focusing the sun’s rays through a magnifying glass and burning lines on the surface of a small piece of wood or card. He works from left to right across the surface of the piece, with the sun always at his shoulder. The work is photographic in the truest sense: each mark or dot is a small black sun, registered on the wood instead of on photographic paper. It records the moment of arrival on earth of rays that left the sun light years ago, coinciding with another journey’s end for the driftwood after a voyage of unknown length in days and sea-miles.
Each line is a repeat pattern of burnt-sun images, scaled down many millions of times. It is an act of meditation, a ritual of some rigour that requires the artist to empty his mind and be very still. He began working with a magnifying glass during his lunch-breaks as a gardener. ‘All I need’, he says, ‘is a pair of standard magnifying glasses from Boots.’ He points out that they mustn’t be too powerful in case they set the wood on fire. Patience and slowness are the essence of Ackling’s art. Every work is a faithful representation of the weather as it really was during the hours it took to make it. He will often work for six or seven hours at a time. If a cloud passes over and obscures the sun, or even if a bird passes, its presence is registered as blank space or ‘shadow’ in the picture because Ackling is moving the glass very slowly and evenly, from left to right along bands of successive lines from top to bottom. He is a camera. Sylvia says she can tell when Ackling has been at work from the pleasant aroma of woodsmoke that lingers in his beard.