John Wells 1907-2000
Squares and Circles, 1964
mixed media on paper
6¼ x 7½ ins
signed lower left

Provenance
Belgrave Gallery, St.Ives



Wells’ work is perhaps one of the least known gems of the output of the group of painters working in St.Ives in the years following WWII, due in part to his personal reticence and his unwillingness to show his work on a regular basis. Indeed, between 1964 and his Tate St.Ives retrospective in 1998, he did not have a single one-man exhibition.

Not an artist known for working on a large scale, his paintings are intimate documents of a journey through abstraction, demonstrating both an awareness of the work of his contemporaries, particularly in his earlier career, and a very personal response to his environment.

The present work, a combination of subtle drawing and lightly applied oil washes, demonstrates this to the full. The small size is typical of the works of the middle 1960’s, a result in part of a crisis of confidence derived from a poor critical reaction to his 1964 Waddington Galleries exhibition, and suggests an artist returning to an exploration of his basic themes of abstraction. However, the combination of freely delineated geometric areas with simple floating circular forms looks outwards to the language of contemporary work such as that of his close friend and keen supporter, Patrick Heron. However, the intimacy of this piece, with its glowing colours, is achieved with great delicacy, an almost polar opposite to Heron’s bravura style.