Margaret Mellis dies

[Portoro]

Margaret Mellis died this week – not well known, she was one of the founding artists of the St Ives school in England (which led to the work by Nicholson, Hepworth and others).
She loved working with washed up beach remains (see below), and with the inherited colours and miscellaneous forms – creating often vivid, coastal, blasted and bashed pieces.
Famously, Damien Hirst visited her in the 1980s, before he went to art school, and spent time walking and talking with her – he has since spoken of her unrecognised significance. For me, a parochial, abstract beauty informs the work, as do the intense colour schemes. Art straight out of life.

[denise lassaw]

The passing of the generations! Thanks for sharing the news- it important for artists to know their ancestors.
denise



The Pollack Krasner House is having a show of drawing by Hedda Stern, the only woman in the famous picture of the "Irascibles" - she is about 97 now. (Married to Saul Steinberg)

Drawing Friends: Hedda Sterne Portraits on Paper

May 1 - July 25, 2009
Hedda Sterne (born 1910) is the only surviving member of “The Irascibles,” avant-garde painters whose group photograph famously appeared in LIFE magazine in 1951. In spite of her identification with that nucleus of America’s most eminent generation of abstract artists, which included Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell—Sterne was the only woman pictured among them—she did not devote herself exclusively to abstraction.