Sea Bird Forms (1951)
Painting by John Wells
'… how can one paint the warmth of the sun, the sound of the sea, the journey of a beetle across a rock …?' John Wells*
This year marks the centenary of the birth of the Cornish painter, John Wells (1907-2000). The son of a bacteriologist who worked at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, and was a colleague of Alexander Fleming, he qualified as a doctor from University College London in 1930. Early on he had shown talent as an artist, and on summer holidays at the family home in Meryon, had been introduced to Ben and Winifred Nicholson, and the influential painter and teacher, Stanhope Forbes. From 1936 to 1945, he was the sole general practitioner on the Isles of Scilly, and the isolation and travels by boat around the 100 square miles of islands stimulated his desire to paint. After the war he gave up doctoring and moved to St Ives.
Influenced by the Nicholsons and Barbara Hepworth, whom he and other young artists helped with her sculptures, and particularly by Naum Gabo, he initially embraced constructivism and collage. But he soon found the appropriate medium for representing nature in abstract, minimalist paintings of mathematical shapes, full of movement, but with muted colours; later he used blocks of richer colours to illustrate abstract landscapes. To promote the modernist cause, he broke away from the traditionalists of the St Ives group and, with like-minded friends, had several successful exhibitions locally. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, he exhibited with success in London, Paris, Sao Paulo and New York, but a poor showing in 1964 led him to withdraw from the wider scene and to paint only for himself, so his reputation has faded. A retrospective was held at Tate St Ives in 1998, and Tate Britain has 22 of his works.
Sea Bird Forms (1951) (43.2 × 49.5 cm) is reproduced by kind permission of the copyright holder, a nephew of the artist, Simon France, to whom I am indebted for helpful information.
Alex Paton
*From a letter to Sven Berlin, quoted in Cross T. Painting the Warmth of the Sun. St Ives Artists 1939–75. West Country Books and Lutterworth Press, 1995:200.
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