I spent the end of last January in Eastbourne. It was a funny trip: a nice hotel room, a run-down seaside town in the dead of winter, an unexpected murmuration. I was there to work on the last push of the first draft of Why Women Grow, but the night before I learned that the editor who had acquired that book and my previous one, Rootbound, wouldn’t be there to read it. It’s a funny thing, the editor-author relationship, rare and precious - perhaps I’ll write about it one day - and so the creativity I had hoped to take to Eastbourne was replaced with a kind of panicked grief. I didn’t write much. I danced alone to LCD Soundsystem. I ran a deep bath and watched And Just Like That. And then, just before leaving, I caught Margaret Mellis’s show at a gallery in town. She would have been 109 this week.

I had 15 minutes to spend at the gallery, but I figured it was better than nothing.  There are times when one has the opportunity to dedicate an hour to an exhibition, or even an afternoon or a whole day, luxuriously reading all the captions and soaking in so many thoughtful, beautiful things as to become nearly blind to it all. But that was not today. 

A gallery snack, though, is a little bonus. A small adventure. It’s how I encountered Margaret Mellis.

Mellis has become one of art history’s footnotes. She moved to Cornwall in 1938, into a house that Ben and Barbara Hepworth would descend upon, kickstarting a movement in the process. A lifelong painter, she was in her later years and widowed when she found she could best express herself by arranging the driftwood that washed up on the shores and marches of the Suffolk coast.

I’d not heard of her, and she was tucked away in the back room of the third floor of the Towner, in Eastbourne. The door to the room was opposite the cafe and the familiar smell of butter-rich baked potato lilted in the air.

Most of the show was dedicated to Mellis’s driftwood works but I was more taken with her earlier paintings - and the first caption I read. “In Untitled, 1937, Mellis captures her own reflection behind a vase of wilted flowers and an overripe banana. This early work introduces her preoccupation with decay.” The work (called Untitled: Still Life with Black Banana in the catalogue) was one of ghostly layers of paint in pastel tones. Mellis, head tilted, cropped hair falling over one eye, exists in a static portrait behind the still life on the table. The banana is unrecognisable: pointed, blacked and shiny, it’s unmistakably phallic poking through a bowl of peaches. 

I didn’t dwell on the driftwood; too abstract for my haste. But in the corner was a kind of antechamber painted powder-room pink. On the walls, in neat wooden box frames, were bright drawings, gloriously dashed off. If the driftwood spoke of age and time and discovery, these better suited a quick look. But they drew me in and made me late: vessels of flowers on the strange geometry envelopes make when they are unfolded.

Mellis was a magpie. The same foraging instinct that inspired her to pick driftwood from the shore encouraged her to save the envelopes that fell upon her doormat. At first, they were simply spare paper - the same that gets used for shopping lists, or jotting down phone numbers. In 1956 she used one to draw anemones in a jar. The flowerheads are heavy: they droop down and nudge the lickable adhesive on the paper’s pointed edge. 

Four decades later she found this, and realised there was something in it. Between 1987 and 2002, she drew on dozens of envelopes, nearly always flowers in jars: dandelion clocks (for a friend’s birthday), daffodils and clematis. Rosebuds, from Matilda, in various states of unfurl. I stood in this pink room and stared at them all, thinking about the old woman who would open her post with meticulous care, flatten out the paper and there, on the kitchen table, draw the nearest bunch in crayon and pastel. Minutes of colour and life from something so often thrown away.

Later, Mellis commented that “the envelope is as important as the flowers”, and you can see this in how she matches the colour and the shape of different papers to their subjects; the strong purples and greens of pansies and marigolds on a letterbox-red rectangle, how two poppies in a jar seem lace-like against the reverse of an airmail logo. 

I wanted more time with the envelopes, so I picked up the catalogue in the shop and I read it on the train home, learning more about this woman I’d never heard of. There are photographs of her at art college, wearing a knowing smile above a striped dressing gown over white trousers; as a sprightly, cropped-hair woman in her seventies and a pair of pink leggings. 

The envelopes are mentioned in the introduction and their inclusion made me smile. Mellis “liked hearing letters thud onto the mat”, it reads; “she liked the transparent windows of business envelopes. She liked their blue linings. Sitting at her kitchen table at night, she drew vases of wild and garden flowers: willowherb and butterbur, poppies, roses, hollyhocks, marigolds and sage.” What a picture that is in itself.