Artist : Trevor Bell
Title : Sharpie
Medium : mixed media on canvas
Dimensions : 56 x 80 x 16 cm


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“I feel that what we should get from art is a sense of wonder, of something beyond ourselves, that celebrates our ‘being’ here.”

Trevor Bell, (1930-2017)

Trevor Bell was a British artist, born in Leeds, England in 1930. He passed away in 2017 in West Cornwall. Bell’s creative interest focussed primarily, on painting’s power to evoke sensation, which for him superseded any illusionistic properties. Ambitious in scale and dynamic in form, the range of work is diverse. His focus was a celebration of mutable energy, elemental forces and a quest for contemplative stillness. He achieved significant critical acclaim and recognition for his direct, abstract forms which emphatically represent the conflic and harmony found in the natural world to the spiritual concerns which connect the inner with all that surrounds us. Chris Stephens (former head of displays at Tate Britain) said “Bell’s art is, in the loosest sense, spiritual. It evokes, or reflects, an idea of some abstract force that exceeds material reality... The dangers and losses of the modern world would be compensated through the rediscovery of natural order and process, and a renewed sense of individual identity would be established through the exploration of forces larger than ourselves. Bell’s work, one might say, has always derived in one way or another from this new sublime.”

Bell attended Leeds College of Art from 1947 to 1952 and, encouraged by Terry Frost, moved to Cornwall in 1955, where he made his reputation as a leading member of the St Ives School, who helped establish British Art on the international stage. Waddington Galleries gave Bell his first solo exhibition in 1958. Patrick Heron wrote the essay for the exhibition, stating that Bell was ‘the best non-figurative painter under thirty’. In 1959 Bell was awarded the Paris Biennale International Painting Prize, and an Italian Government Scholarship and the following year was offered the Gregory Fellowship in Painting at the University of Leeds. Throughout the 1960’s Bell showed work in major exhibitions in the UK and USA and during this time his work was first purchased for the Tate collection. In 1973 he presented his work at the Whitechapel Gallery, having just taken part in a major exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC. Over the course of the next thirty years Bell combined painting with teaching eventually moving to Florida State University to become the Professor for Master Painting. He went on to spend the next 20 years in America. Important exhibitions were held at the Corcoran Gallery; the Academy of Sciences in Washington, the Metropolitan Museum in Miami, The Cummer Gallery and the Museum of Art at Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In 1985 Bell was included in the London Tate Gallery’s St Ives 1939-64 exhibition and in 1993 he was part of the inaugural show of the Tate St Ives. Bell had a major solo exhibition at the Tate St.Ives in 2004 and, in 2011, a further 14 works were obtained by the Tate for their permanent collection. Bell has works in numerous public and private collections internationally.