Trevor Bell (1930–2017)

Biography

Trevor Bell was born in Leeds and attended the Leeds College of Art from 1947 to 1952. The exciting artistic activity in West Cornwall and St Ives in particular led Bell to moving there in the mid-1950s.

Bell got a lot of encouragement from the older generation of artists based in Cornwall, among them Terry Frost, Ben Nicholson and Patrick Heron. Bell’s first solo exhibition was at the Waddington Galleries in 1958, Heron wrote the introduction and in it said that Bell was ‘the best non-figurative painter under thirty’. His first exhibition was a great success and the following year he was awarded the prize for Painting at the Biennale de Paris.

Bell stayed in St Ives for five years, his style developing first through geometric abstracted landscapes to more lyrically fluid abstraction. In 1960 he was offered the Gregory Fellowship in Painting at the University of Leeds, with Sir Herbert Read and Henry Moore on the advisory committee at the time. The Gregory Fellowship was an important opportunity for a contemporary artists to develop their work over the course of three years without the obligations and responsibility of teaching or other work to sustain themselves. During this time in the early 1960s is when Bell first began to experiment with his shaped canvases, pushing through the traditional boundaries of painting.

Bell was offered the position of Professor of Master Painting at Florida State University in 1976. As part of the position he was given a large warehouse studio, inspiring him to make some of his largest paintings. Bell stayed in Florida for 20 years before returning to the UK and settling back in Cornwall. He established a studio in Penzance and continued working in his distinctive abstract style.

Bell produced a large body of work, with all periods being well presented in public collection including the Tate, Arts Council, British Council, Leeds City Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum, Phoenix Art Museum (Arizona, USA), Getty Centre or the History of Art (California, USA), the British Museum and others. The Tate acquired fourteen additional works in 2014.