Bijou, 1995, 12.7 x 17.8 cm. Multimedia on board.
Some Quotations:
Lawrence Alloway (7 Jan 196l, Weekly Post)
"New work by Plumb and Stroud was seen for the first time in the group exhibition(of 18 artists) at the RBA last year - Situation. Their work, in which formality and ambiguity are extraordinarily fused, should be known to everybody interested in the current art scene. Next Summer an architectural exhibition on the South Bank will include large works by Bernard Cohen, Plumb, and Stroud, a demonstration, like Robyn Denny's muralin Austin Reed's... of their capacity to work publicly on a large scale. However, all these artists are, basically, easel painters and they stand in need of the easel painter's traditional route to the public galleries. It is to be hoped, despite the sombre prospect,that the London galleries will find space in their schedules of exhibitions by foreign artists and established British artists for a rising generation."
Lawrence Alloway (Introduction to Catalogue for solo exhibition at the Molton Gallery,London, 196l -
this extract being used also on the card for the solo
(retrospective) exhibition at the Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, 1965) -
"The dimensional use of colour, in which each change of colour is identified with a change of shape, in Plumb's hands, is amazingly subtle. The spectator is engaged in a display of colours. The clean brilliance of which derives from Plumb's incisive technique; the effect of their compilation - and here Plumb's tough, lyrical colour sense takes over- is of flaring colour, active and irradiating. The use of counter change, either on a large scale in the painted areas, or compacted in the tape clusters, joins the whole painting into one interlocking unit. Each strong local colour is subject to perceptual variation by the pressure of neighbouring colours."
The Times (24 August 1961), reviewing the exhibition "The New London Situation" at the New London Gallery-
"Mr John Plumb provides a vibrating effect to the eye with his stretches of tape,on painted board, verticals and horizontals being controlled with a nicety of variation in the width, relation, and colour value of the strips of material he uses."
The Times (1 June 1962) -
"An important group of "hard-edge" paintings has been presented to the Tate Gallery by Mr E J Power through the Friends of the Tate Gallery. The group include some work by an American artist, Ellsworth Kelly's "Broadway" of 1958, and four by British artists, Bernard Cohen's "Early Mutation Green No. II", John Plumb's "Edgehill", Peter Stroud's "Six Thin Reds", 1960, and William Turnbull's two-piece "No. 1 1962"."
The Times (16 August 1966) -
article "The cult of the simple in modern art" by Edward Lucie-Smith -"... pictures by John Plumb which are currently on view at the Axiom Gallery. Plumb is a very distinguished abstract artist, and this show is, I think, his best so far. The pictures, however, are of a kind which deliberately shuts out any response but the aesthetic one. They are fields of colour. The central area - a rich, velvety, but unvarying expanse of one tone - is given dynamism by the intrusion of other, contrasting and complementary colours at the extreme edges of the canvas ... I find the effect of these pictures to be as complex as they themselves are apparently simple. The colour produces a certain sort of sensation - impossible fully to describe, like all colour perceptions. But there is also a part of me which responds at one remove; which responds to the response; which is interested, so to speak, by the capacity of appreciation which has been aroused,rather than by the picture itself...."
The Guardian, May/June 1968 -
London Galleries, by Norbert Lynton - "A more assertive use of colour and of form characterises John Plumb's new paintings at the Axiom Gallery. He used to paint large colour fields and to activate them by disturbing their edges with more or less wavering bands of contrasting colour. Now everything is firm and clear; clear geometrical blocks occupy certain positions in the colour field. But the programme hasn't changed; it is still the disruptive action of the small units across the field that matters, the way they tense and mobilise what at first seems an inert surface. And the surreptitious conflict is all the more effective now for being between more unambiguous elements."
The Sunday Observer, 4 March 1973 -
review by Nigel Gosling of solo exhibition at the Common wealth Institute Gallery - The large, simple, splendidly lit space, with its calm view over Holland Park, makes a heart-lifting effect at present with a show of paintings by John Plumb. Some of them are both large and bright, but they look perfectly at home. His beautifully calculated tracts of luminous colour - he plays off diverging bands broken up as if into staccato notes - look both elegant and solid, and the small gouache drawings show his sense of scale.
The Financial Times, 5 October 1974-
review of exhibition British Painting 1974 at the Hayward Gallery by William Packer - "there are distinguished contributions from Paul Huxley, John Hoyland, Michael Mayer,John Carter, Henry Mundy, Kenneth Martin and John Plumb, that more than make up for tire some contributions from..."
The Sunday Times, 21 March 1993-
Nostalgia trip by Frank Whitford - (referring to the Sixties exhibition at the Barbican) - "Agreeably, by no means all the most impressive work is by familiar names, and it is good to be reminded of the quality of work by artists who, well-known 25 years ago, have been relatively neglected since. One of them is John Plumb, whose rare sense of scale and colour made him one of the best abstract painters of the period."
Catalogue of solo exhibition at the Bath Contemporary Art Fair, May 1993
-from statement by Frank Whitford "The new paintings reveal an artist at the height of his powers. Paradoxically, the return to figuration (in the 1980s) which eventually led to the new work turns out not to have been an interruption in Plumb's development at all, but a means of enabling him more fully to understand the nature of his earlier work and to build on its achievement. In spite of all superficial appearances to the contrary, the colour-field paintings and the latest abstract compositions are intimately related. Plumb remains what he always was: one of the most convincing abstract painters of his generation."
