John Blackburn (2 June 1932 – 22 October 2022) was a British abstract painter, who, after critical success in the 1960s, fell into relative obscurity until the early 2000s.
[3][4] His paintings were 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.
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.
[7] Blackburn's abstract paintings are held in the private collections of Paul Zuckerman and Natalia Grosvenor, Duchess of Westminster.
In addition, his paintings are housed in university collections across Britain and Ireland, including Cambridge, Kent, Essex, Newcastle, and Trinity College Dublin.