Bell made an important contribution to the younger generation of St Ives' painters in the 1950s alongside more established peers, Terry Frost and Roger Hilton. Patrick Heron wrote that Bell...
Bell made an important contribution to the younger generation of St Ives' painters in the 1950s alongside more established peers, Terry Frost and Roger Hilton. Patrick Heron wrote that Bell was "the best non-figurative painter under thirty in the country".
Painting with Black Tensions is an early example of Bell's enduring interest in the relationship between shape and colour, a theme he was still exploring when the Tate St Ives held a solo show of his work Beyond Materiality from October 2004 to January 2005.