John Plumb

John Plumb (6 February 1927 – 6 April 2008) was an English abstract painter and art teacher. He was one of the twenty painters in Situation, the 1960 exhibition that brought a large-scale, American-influenced abstraction to prominence in Britain, and taught from the mid-1950s onwards, latterly as senior lecturer in painting at the Central School of Art and Design. From 1977 he worked largely in landscape and figuration before returning to abstraction in the 1990s.

Early life and education Plumb was born in Luton, England on 6 February 1927, and was brought up there. Before training as an artist he served an apprenticeship at Vauxhall Motors, the town's car manufacturer, as a trainee auto-stylist.

Plumb exhibited with the New English Art Club in 1948 while still a student, showing a portrait of Joan Lawrence, his future wife; the painting sold, and was noticed favourably in a review in The Observer. Situation has been characterised as a break from the landscape-rooted abstraction of the St Ives School in favour of large-scale painting responding to recent American work; the participants became known informally as the Situation Group.

In the early 1960s Plumb built his compositions from coloured adhesive tapes manufactured for the electrical industry, which were obtained for him by the collector E. J. Power. Because the tapes could be lifted and repositioned, the apparent rigour of the finished paintings was arrived at by trial and error. Edgehill (1962, Tate), shown in Situation, is built from stripes of industrial PVC tape; Tate records its medium as acrylic paint, PVC, vinyl and tape on canvas. It was given to the Tate by E. J. Power through the Friends of the Tate Gallery in 1962.

Plumb died at Yarnscombe on 6 April 2008, aged 81. In 1969 he was appointed senior lecturer in painting at the Central School of Art and Design (1969–1982), where he had himself been a student two decades earlier, holding the post for thirteen years. His Independent obituarist wrote that he committed himself to teaching with a single-mindedness that inspired his students but left little time for his own painting." Edgehill (1962, presented by E. J. Power through the Friends of the Tate Gallery, 1962), Untitled August 1969 (1969) and Hydrastructure – What It Is (1992).

The Arts Council Collection holds two of Plumb's works Untitled No.9 (1964) and Bermuda (1965).

The Victoria and Albert Museum holds works including prints and a furnishing fabric Plumb designed for Heal's.

Art market In 2007 a colour-field painting of the 1960s sold at Sotheby's for £17,400 against an estimate of £4,000. 1965, Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, UK 1973, Commonwealth Arts Centre Gallery, London, UK 1997, Landscape to Abstraction – 1985 to 1997 Burton Art Gallery, Bideford, Devon 2002, The Atkinson Gallery, Somerset 1974, British Painting '74, Hayward Gallery, London 1990, Art 90, Olympia, London 2004, Art & the 60s: This Was Tomorrow, Tate Britain, London