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 Austria, France, Ireland and USA. His work is exhibited world-wide but his strongest links outside the UK are with the USA, Japan, Germany, Austria, Denmark, The Netherlands, 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. Of 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."

Currently he makes relatively small paintings on board, in contrast with his early colour 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. In the 1980’s he worked on multi-part units of painted shapes, the most notable of which were first shown at the Lisson Gallery in 1981.

From the 1990’s onwards his paintings present remote and evocative abstract spaces in which to place one’s own imaginings. Their character lies captured between layer upon layer of semi-transparent oil based glazes that build up a visible history of colour and brush marks. This process gives the work a physical and an atmospheric quality but does not provide specific pictorial or geographic detail. His current paintings employ hand- painted collaged elements in addition to working directly onto the surface of a work.

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.