Title: ‘Pink and Grey’

Artist: John Blackburn (1932-) - signed on reverse

Artist biography:

John Blackburn is a British abstract painter, who, after critical success in the 1960s, fell into relative obscurity until the early 2000s.

John Blackburn was born in Luton and attended the Margate School of Art, where he studied textile design. After school, he served in the National Service (and later lived) in New Zealand, Malaysia, and the surrounding area from 1954 to 1962. In Auckland, New Zealand, he met his future wife, Maudie McKinnon. Soon after the couple married, they settled in Glenfield, New Zealand. It was in New Zealand that Blackburn started painting; he exhibited at the Circle Gallery in Auckland, which established him as a “radical” painter, with his “simple, reduced strong forms in limited pure, unmixed colours.”

In 1962, Blackburn, with his wife and three children, returned to Britain, where the influential art collector and gallery owner Jim Ede saw his one-man show in London’s Woodstock Gallery. Impressed by what he saw, Ede offered Blackburn a place in his Kettle’s Yard gallery in Cambridge among artists including Peter Lanyon, William Scott, and Roger Hilton (Kettle’s Yard own over 20 works in their permanent collection). Soon after, Blackburn’s ten-year-old daughter became ill and needed a kidney transplant. Blackburn volunteered, spending six months in intense physical training to prepare for the organ transplantation. The time spent before and after the successful surgery prompted Blackburn to drop from the public eye for a number of years. In 2006, Blackburn had a show at the Metropole Galleries in Folkestone; his work had not appeared in a commercial gallery since 1968. This led to a revival of interest in Blackburn’s body of work as he approached eighty-years old. Blackburn’s abstract paintings are now held in private and public collections worldwide.

Biography courtesy of Osborne Samuel Gallery, London.

Ref: ‘John Blackburn’ by Ian Massey - published by Sanson and Company, 2018.

Date: 2009/10

Medium: Oil on canvas laid on board

Dimensions: Frame size: 32.5cm x 25cm: Board size 29cm x 21.5cm

Condition: Excellent, original condition. Wonderful texture to the paint.

A small but very strong example of John’s work.