Inside the envelope

The idea of collaging with envelope interiors has led instead to printing on them -Coincidentally, a flower-drawing inside an envelope - by Margaret Mellis, from a 2009 exhibition (see more here; read about her life and work here) -

"In 1956 Margaret Mellis made her first ‘envelope’ flower drawing. On a small, torn, blue envelope she sketched - in pencil - two dying anemones in a glass jar. Looking at that delicate and fugitive drawing today, one wonders where Mellis’s intention lay. Was the use of the envelope deliberate or simply the answer to a practical need in which to capture a brief moment of a dying flower.

"In 1959 Mellis threw away most of what she referred to as her ‘scribbles’ but for whatever reason, kept that one drawing and only came upon it again in 1987. The importance of that envelope sketch, made thirty years earlier, is that it directly relates to Mellis’s later driftwood constructions in that the materials used in both are from ‘found’ objects. On re-discovering the drawing she said that the pencil lines and the shape of the envelope had fused together and become ‘significant’. Mellis saw its potential and over a ten year period from 1987 she made around 100 drawings, of which only 40 remain."

I first encountered these drawings in the mid-90s in a commercial gallery, and the memory has stayed with me - a nice twist on writing a shopping list on the back of the envelope!