Trevor Bell
Born and educated in Leeds, Trevor Bell moved to Cornwall whilst in his twenties and soon established himself as a leading member of the St Ives school. His first solo exhibition was held at the Waddington Galleries in London in 1958 and sold out before the opening night. Patrick Heron declared him to be “the best non-figurative painter under thirty in Britain”. Immediately afterwards he was awarded the Paris Biennale International Painting Prize and an Italian Government Scholarship. In 1970 he was accorded a retrospective exhibition which toured England, Scotland and Ireland. Three years later the Whitechapel Gallery in London gave him a major one-man show. In the mid-1970s Bell moved to the United States to take up a post as professor of painting at Florida State University. Important exhibitions were held at the Corcoran Gallery and the Academy of Sciences in Washington DC, and the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, among others. He was included in the London Tate Gallery’s St. Ives 1939 to 1964 exhibition and, since his return to live in Cornwall in 1996, has been given a major retrospective at the Tate Gallery, St Ives.