Trevor Bell (British, b.1930) is an Abstract painter who earned his following as a member of the St. Ives group of artists in the early 1950s. Ben Nicholson (British, 1910–1962), one of the other artists in the group, became a friend and mentor for Bell, providing sound advice and encouragement. Bell eventually became a modern post-war artist whose work often challenges conventional ideas about painting. After graduating in 1952 from the College of Art in Leeds, Yorkshire, the artist moved to Cornwall, where he was inspired to turn his industrial landscape paintings into Abstract pictures.

A collection of Bell’s paintings were placed in an exhibit at the Tate Gallery, St. Ives, from 1995 to 1996, and he was involved in the John Moores Exhibition the same year. In 1958, his first one-man show was held at Waddington Galleries; this show was an immense success. A year later, Bell received the Italian Government Scholarship and the Paris Biennale International Painting Prize as a result of his popularity. Many successful shows followed for the artist in Ireland, England, and London, until 1973, at which time he became a graduate professor for painting at the Florida State University in Tallahassee. During this time, the artist created large, intense paintings that helped establish his reputation in the United States.

His work is seen extensively in public collections, including those at the Leeds City Museum in Yorkshire, the Getty Center for the History of Art in California, and the McMaster Museum of Art in Canada. Bell has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions, including Moving Right Along: Paintings from 1948 to the Present Day (2009) and The Florida Years (2004). Additional honours for the artist include the Florida Art Fellowship and being named an Honorary Fellow at University College Falmouth. Bell moved back to England in 1996, until his death in 2017.

John Bellany studied painting at Edinburgh College of Art under Sir Robin Phillipson from 1960 to 1965. During this time he gained an Andrew Grant Scholarship in 1962, taking him to Paris and in 1965 he received a Postgraduate Travelling Scholarship enabling him to travel to Holland and Belgium. He went on to attend the Royal College of Art, London, where he studied under Carel Weight and Peter de Francia from 1965 to 1968. Bellany went on to be Lecturer in Painting at Brighton College of Art in 1968 and from 1969 to 1973 was Lecturer in Painting at Winchester College of Art, Visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art and at Goldsmiths College of Art. From 1978 to 1984 he was Lecturer in Painting at Goldsmiths College of Art and was Artist in Residence at Victoria College of the Arts, Melbourne in 1983.

Bellany’s first solo exhibitions were held at the Dromidaris Gallery, Holland (1965), at Edinburgh College of Art (1968) and at Winchester School of Art (1969). From 1970 he exhibited in solo shows annually throughout the UK. His first international solo exhibition was held at Rosa Esman Gallery, New York in 1982 and this quickly led to a string of exhibitions around the world. In 1986 he was given the first solo show ever to be held at the National Portrait Gallery, London, centred around his portrait of Ian Botham, commissioned by the NPG. He also had a solo show at the National Portrait Gallery, Scotland in 1994, exhibiting his portrait of the composer, Peter Maxwell Davis commissioned by the gallery; this was surrounded by other works by Bellany, held in its collection.

Retrospectives of his work were held in 1983 (touring the UK, the United States and Australia), in 1986 at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh and the Serpentine Gallery, London, in 1988 at the Ruth Siegel Gallery, New York and at the Hamburger Kunsthalle and Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund (1988-89). His work has also been included in many key group exhibitions both nationally and internationally since 1963.

Among Bellany’s numerous awards are the Burston Award at the Royal College of Art (1965), John Moores Prize Winner (1980), Major Arts Council Award (1981), Athena International Art Award (joint first-prize winner, 1985) and the Royal Academy’s Wollaston Award (1987). In 1992 he received a British Council visit to Central Europe and in 1993 he won the Korn/Ferry Picture of the Year Award at the Royal Academy. His commissions include murals for Chesser House, Edinburgh (commissioned by the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries in 1965) and the portraits of Lord Renfrew and Sir Roy Caine (commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery, London).

Bellany was elected Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 1988 and in 1994 was awarded the CBE. He went on to be given an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Edinburgh in 1996 and an Honorary D Lit by Heriot Watt, University of Edinburgh in 1998. He was elected RA in 1991 (ARA 1986), Honorary Member of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1986, and in 1998 was made a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art, London.

John Blackburn occupies an unusual position in British art. Born in Luton, he trained at Margate School of Art before doing National Service and going to live for a time in New Zealand and the Pacific Islands (1954-62). He returned to England and a period of early success in the 1960s, when his work was bought by Jim Ede (who founded Kettle’s Yard). After that, Blackburn largely dropped off the artistic radar until he was rediscovered in 2002; but since then, his reputation has deservedly gone from strength to strength, and he has become re-established as a name to conjure with. Now in his eightieth year, Blackburn is recognized as an abstract painter of originality and vision, an artist capable of taking the Modernist project of St Ives (Hilton, Scott,Wynter, Lanyon and Frost) into the twenty-first century, and breaking his own new ground.

Nearly forty years in the wilderness have neither embittered Blackburn nor deterred him from pursuing his own path. He divides his time between a studio in Kent and foreign travel. Recently, he has spent the early part of each year back in New Zealand, where he enjoys working in different personal and physical conditions. Blackburn responds to context, and the quality of light in New Zealand affects his sense of colour, resulting in some uncharacteristic pastel tints. This lighter (and perhaps more lighthearted) palette has begun to enrich the work he makes in England. Looked at overall, Blackburn’s paintings have been predominantly brown, black and white.Now, blue and pink have been steadily creeping in, vermilion even, while various ochres enliven the habitual greys and whites. ‘Pink Form’ (2010) (p17) is a fine example of this – also of the tall upright format the artist often favours. The constraints of this shape seem to suit him, and the group of upright paintings contain some of his best and most inventive shapemusic of recent years.

This is not to suggest that the work Blackburn generally makes in Kent is uniformly dark and doom-laden. But on home territory, the artist engages directly with his longterm preoccupations, and derives more inspiration from his internal landscape than from his external surroundings. His paintings are not directly of figure or landscape, but deal with relationships and states of mind, and these less readily definable qualities invariably involve both people and environments. Art is about making ethical and poetic judgements, about discerning nuance. It is also about bringing together a number of generalities to reach a concrete formal conclusion (the painting), which the artist hopes will act as a bridge between himself and his potential audience. This process of transformation can only be achieved through the constant practice of making art, but it is often the addition of happenstance which brings about resolution. In other words, the roles of intuition, juxtaposition and the irrational are just as important as anything intended. The unexpected is crucial.

The addition of extraneous matter to the picture plane is one of Blackburn’s favourite strategies for surprising himself into making a telling statement. In this he somewhat parallels the activities of the late Catalan artist and alchemist, Antoni Tàpies. There is too much talk of alchemy in modern art commentary (it’s an easy metaphor for the transformative processes of art), and in Blackburn’s case it’s preferable to concentrate on the witty way in which the artist extends his formal vocabulary. Several new paintings incorporate bits of old iron (one fragment even resembles a man trap or chastity belt) (p55), and ‘Shoe Picture 1’ (2012) (p47) includes several pairs of shoes. The satiric aspect of Blackburn’s work emerges strongly here, in a painting which triumphantly appropriates a post-Pop idiom, with more than a genial nod and a wink to Rauschenberg.

Blackburn defines a great painting as a balancing act between self-expression and impersonal statement, the point at which form and content are held in fruitful dialogue, and ‘the artist has managed to extract himself when the painting’s at its highest level’. This is an operation fraught with risk, and the artist must be prepared to lose the painting in order to succeed. The exposure to risk is essential to the health of the activity. This is one reason why so often he paints wet on wet, in itself a risky procedure, and why he pushes his forms into three dimensions with collaged additions.

The material dispositions of his paint are surprising and intriguing, his mark-making generates an unexpected play of thoughts and emotions – the whole physical presence of Blackburn’s paintings is original and compelling. There is nothing polite here. There might be lumps in the canvas – folds or overlaps, different layers. These are intentional. If Blackburn wants a smooth surface he makes one. In the same way if he wants the paint to run, he encourages it; otherwise a form is carefully and precisely outlined.

Blackburn’s list of admired artists ranges from Goya to Roger Hilton, via Fautrier and Bacon. Twombly is one of his favourites because of the beauty in his work, beauty that does the spirit good. All have inspired him and some have proved very useful to steal from – as recommended by Picasso. One or two paintings seem to contain an echo of Hilton, but Blackburn’s personal vision has turned a shared formal device (abutting square, circular or boat-shaped forms; an inventive use of outline with vigorously applied paint) into something very much his own. There is a world of difference between using a gimmick – such as a specific unusual texture or material – and redeploying a shape which in its fulfilled ordinariness is a lasting one in the general vocabulary of forms available to all artists. For instance, the circle or sphere can never be exhausted because it is the basic form of so much central to our lives: the world itself, the belly, the sun, the womb, the moon, the breast.

Two paintings made earlier this year, ‘Brown/Black Squares’ (right) and ‘Black, Brown,White’ (p51), feature a row of black dots along the top, rather like holes or the perforations in a spiral-bound sketchbook. This similarity confirms in these large paintings the immediacy of the sketch that was already present in Blackburn’s paint-handling. There is an urgency and spontaneity to much of his best imagery which affirms the potent informality of his approach and suggests the work of a much younger man. It is this ability to question his aims and assumptions, and fruitfully to reinterpret favourite themes, which ensures John Blackburn’s continuing relevance as an artist.

A Mixed Palette

Repeatedly asked why he does not tend to paint his native Scotland, John Brown states simply, ‘I like to be warm’, going on to praise the quality of light and colour in the various Mediterranean destinations that he uses for inspiration. ‘A Mixed Pallette’ is perhaps a fitting description for Brown’s December show at Lemon Street Gallery: as an artist who regularly bases his exhibitions on his most recent travels, this current body of work features pictorial sources from various residencies across Europe – from Corfu and Paxos, to Moire and Collioure. The show demonstrates the artist’s pure and genuine zeal for colour and light, with works that range dramatically in size and stylistic representation, yet maintaining the constant vibrancy and beauty for which Brown is so well acclaimed.

Regularly flitting between abstract and pictorial representation in his paintings, Brown has yet to be pinned down as a painter of solely one or the other, a style that he compares to Richard Diebenkorn, an artist frequently cited as a particular source of inspiration for Brown in his use of colour and methods. Brown also uses his own preliminary work as a basis for progression – his on-the-spot sketches are seen as gateways into his ‘flirtation with abstraction’, as he focuses on the sketches’ tonality or linear quality as a method of determining how the final piece will look.Working predominantly on board, the surface is prepared using a mixture of collage materials, including paper, canvas and fabric in various textures, in order to give the bright acrylics that dominate the mood of the work ‘something to cling to’. The result is an intriguing, multitonal piece that captures the spirit of its location-based subject in both its bold use of colour, and its tactile intricacy. More recent work sees a dramatic introduction of stark black lines that kick out against the bright colours, creating a very deliberate juxtaposition.

Brown’s fascination with texture is what pervades his choice of subject, seen in his frequent return to the decaying grandeur of old European towns and villages. ‘I get drawn to the same sorts of subjects wherever I am,’ Brown says. ‘I fall in love with surface textures: distressed walls, flaking paint, footprints, washing hanging out of windows, fruit and veg markets.’ Combined with the sun-bleached colours and light of the Mediterranean, the end result is pleasantly tactile and evocative. Another key interest of Brown’s is windows, and their artistic potential as subjects for an artist whose work centres on multiple layers and surfaces, and the illusion of texture and depth that comes from painting and using a variety of materials and techniques.

John Brown’s December show at Lemon Street Gallery is a fantastic mix of shape and tonal vibrancy. The works illustrate Brown’s versatility across many different styles and showcases the entire spectrum of his interest in locational subjects.

Rosie Willmot 2011