Village 1948 Oil and pencil on card. Signed and dated, numbered 87/17, studio stamped and inscribed on verso. 275 x 385 mm (11 x 15 1/4 inches).		JOHN WELLS London 1907 ~ 2000 John Wells qualified as a doctor at University College London. However, this very passionate, and unique, man spent all his spare time painting and drawing. During a trip to Cornwall in 1928 he studied briefly with Stanhope Alexander Forbes in Newlyn and was introduced to Ben and Winifred Nicholson and Christopher Wood. From 1936 until 1945 he worked as a doctor in the Scilly Isles. During this period he made occasional visits to Nicholson and Hepworth in St. Ives and met Naum Gabo who became a major and lasting influence on him. At the end of the Second World War he decided to become a full-time artist and bought one of Forbes's former studios in Newlyn. Wells was at the centre of artistic in post-war St. Ives. He was a founder member of the Crypt Group in 1946 and of the Penwith Society of Artists in Cornwall in 1949. He exhibited widely in London, Paris, Sao Paolo and New York as well as St Ives, and in 1965 he acquired a second studio in Newlyn which he shared for nearly thirty years with the sculptor Denis Mitchell. Tate St Ives held a major retrospective of his work in 1998 and a number of his paintings are in the collection at Tate, London. Wells was initially influenced by Constructivism through his contact with Ben Nicholson and Gabo. After the war he moved on to an abstract style inspired by the landscape of Cornwall and very much in line with the approach of other artists of the St Ives school. However, when such painters as Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron and Bryan Wynter radically altered their work in response to the impact of mid-century American painting from the mid-1950s, Wells continued to look back to the pre-war International Modernist Movement and the work of Paul Klee. In our oil sketch he has combined the formal language of Modernism with a love of landscape forms extending back to Klee's vision of a modern art that retained a level of human spirituality. Wells also shared with Klee an interest in broader abstract composition such as music and poetry. There is a poetic quality in his consistent search for an art that reveals universal structures of rhythm, growth and proportion symbolising our position in relation to the natural world. By contrast, after 1960 he adopts a more austere, linear style which gives his search for balance and harmony a new sense of formality. It should be noted that our sketch is also related to a series of etchings done at this time.