Trevor Sutton lives and works in London. He went to art school in the 1960’s, graduating with a post-graduate diploma in 1972. He has from the outset, remained a non-figurative painter and printmaker. In addition to working in London, he has taken up many residencies and fellowships abroad, most recently in France and Ireland.

 

In Sutton's studio, one finds a systemic beauty and careful order in the layout of his working environment. The same aesthetic applies to his art - the restraints of a ritualistic and ordered process embedded within the sensual physicality of oil paint.

 

On an occasion in his studio Sutton wrote in 2007:

 

"Minimalist music plays in fading light. Drifting white smoke, pink, silver-grey horizon. The sound of air. Times like these are embedded in my paintings: the sound of seeing, the colour of mind, painting as frozen time."

 

He makes paintings on board, in contrast with his early color field paintings on canvas from the 1970’s. Throughout his career, he has also always been interested in ‘shaped paintings’ and has regularly worked on a circular format in addition to the more conventional rectangle or square.From the 1990’s onwards his paintings presented remote and evocative abstract spaces in which to place one’s own imaginings.  His new work is fed by a seemingly irrational take on life, a life that gets re-ordered within the hierarchy of the grid. The paintings have a clear history of gesture and mark but this physicality becomes ordered, restrained by the grid. His color is intuitive and reactive, encouraging shifting patterns and rhythms that suggest a kind of visual music.

 

Trevor Sutton was a Senior Lecturer in Painting at Chelsea School of Art & Design from 1973 to 2000 and a Research Fellow there from 2000 to 2003. He is married to fellow artist Carol Robertson. In 2014, they published a book together, Carol Robertson Trevor Sutton - French Paintings, published by Peter Foolen Editions in The Netherlands. 

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CV Available Upon Request.