Oscar Mellor

An associate of the Birmingham Surrealists in the 1940s, he founded the Fantasy Press after his move to Oxford in 1948, publishing works by university poets who emerged into prominence during the 1960s.

[1] Oscar Mellor was born and educated in Manchester, moving to Birmingham with his family in 1939 and serving as a fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force during World War II.

[4] Mellor was also an illustrator, accompanying a translation of Ovid's Amores that he published in 1954 with line drawings of female nudes,[5] aimed at the gift market.

Although Mellor's early paintings included bleak deserted landscapes, the female form was a recurrent motif in his art.

Strongly influenced by Freudian theory, female desire and sexual freedom became a major theme[9] that, with his association with the Nicholas Treadwell Gallery in London in the first half of the 1970s, grew increasingly erotic.