This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Trevor Bell is an abstract painter, associated with the St. Ives Colony*, where he lived early and late in his career. He is also known for an important innovation as "in a radical rethinking of painterly practice he began to make works that were not confined by their frames but instead made the frame an intrinsic part of their design." (amazon)
Born in Leeds, England in 1930, he studied at the Leeds College of Art from 1947 to 1952, and also he did teaching at Harrogate Art College. Inspired from meeting St. Ives artist Terry Frost at Leeds, Bell determined to go to Cornwall where, in the early 1950s, he became a leading member of the St. Ives artists, having arrived on an old motorcycle in 1955. He joined the Penwith Society* and shared a basement studio with Brian Wall. At that tine, he stayed only five years and looking back, never considered himself limited to being a St. Ives artist. But scholars have noted that being there in the 1950s was formative for his work
because the northern industrial landscapes he had been painting "gave way to mainly semi-abstract paintings that evoked a sense of landscape, focusing on the meeting of natural forces---waves breaking on the shore---and such natural structures as fields and cliffs."
(Button, 60)
In 1958 he exhibited in a one-man show at the Waddington Galleries* in London. On this occasion, St. Ives artist Patrick Heron declared Bell "the best non-figurative painter under thirty working in Britain." (Button, 60) The show sold out before it opened.
In 1960, he accepted a Gregory Fellowship* to teach painting at Leeds University, and stayed there until the early 1970s. After a large traveling retrospective in Scotland, Ireland and England in 1970 and a major one-man show at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1973, Bell established a studio in Tallahassee, Florida where he worked as Professor of Painting at Florida State University from 1973 to 1996.
Then he returned to Cornwall where two large-scale
paintings of his have been exhibited at the Tate Gallery*, St Ives, and in 2000, a major exhibition of his work was held at the North Light Gallery in Huddersfield. He located his home and
studios are near Penzance.
In summary, Trevor Bell has lived and worked in England, France, Italy and Canada. He has been a regular exhibitor in private galleries in Miami, Atlanta and Chicago, and has works purchased and commissioned in numerous international museums, public and private collections.
Sources:
Virginia Button, St. Ives Artists A Companion
Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Bell_%28artist%29
www.amazon.com-product description of book, Trevor Bell, Tate St. Ives
* For more in-depth information about these terms and others, see AskART.com Glossary http://www.askart.com/AskART/lists/Art_Definition.aspx
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