Trevor Bell ' Beyond the Edge

T R E V O R B E L L

B E Y O N D T H E E D G E

Trevor Bell’s latest works may be created from 

canvas and paint, but to describe them as 

paintings would be wrong. They are not intended 

to be representations of something else, nor are 

they self reflective works of ‘art for art’s sake’. 

Instead, they are self-contained objects, moments 

of wonder that Bell has found and brought into 

the light. They hover on the wall, differently 

sized and shaped canvases grouped together; 

colour propping up colour, their dynamic forms 

held in delicate tension or balanced with a gravity 

defying lightness. 

Now eighty five,Trevor Bell is still pushing the 

boundaries, his new works taking us beyond 

the edge into a new territory. Colour no longer 

bursts out of the canvas to saturate the world and 

engulf the viewer. It is no longer there to prompt 

memories and demand an emotional response. 

Instead, Bell asks us to consider the weight 

of colour. He explores it as noun rather than 

adjective, something of mass and substance. It 

props up and balances; it serves as weight and 

counterweight, it asks questions of near and far. 

Associations with the landscape still linger in 

shades of purple, blue and sand, but they have 

become secondary in the balancing act that colour 

now performs. 

Vibrant blacks dominate these paintings, a 

presence bursting into the world through a void 

of white. These blacks exert a gravitational pull 

that holds each painting down. However, look 

into these black holes and you become lost; 

freed from edges and boundaries, floating in the 

weightless vacuum of seemingly limitless space. It 

is then we notice the white, no longer an area of 

emptiness, but something of substance, a solid 

ground holding these bottomless pools. This 

constantly shifting tension between weight and 

weightlessness is reflected in the forms of 

these new works – fulcrums holding shapes of 

apparently different size in perfect balance, 

hinting at the optical illusion imposed by distance, 

where equivalence becomes difference and large 

becomes small. 

These jagged black forms are not just about 

weight, however, but also about the process of 

emergence, the transition between being and 

nothingness, formlessness and form. Like the 

related series of Dance drawings, they serve as a 

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choreographic notation, charting the progress of 

a line of energy as it is released into the world to 

become form. 

There is a zen-like simplicity to Bell’s mark 

making, a rootedness in the present that is 

unrelated to anything outside itself. Each mark 

is like the duration of a breath - a self contained 

moment, yet dependent upon everything around 

it. These vivid marks trace the trajectory of Bell’s 

arm as it moves across the surface of paper 

and canvas, the thinning paint and ragged edges 

reflecting the slowly ebbing flow of pigment 

through the bristles of his brush. 

moment between inhalation and exhalation, the 

unnoticed tension that separates one thing from 

another. These self contained objects are not 

about anything, they don’t refer to anything, 

they are not subject to anything. They are. They 

are celebrations of existence and being, that 

take us beyond the edge of form into the space 

of becoming. 

Richard Davey, 2016 

Yet these new works are more than the marks 

that lie within the contours of the canvas. Around 

their edges are subtler lines – shadow-lines and 

imperceptible highlights that both contain and 

dissolve these active contours. They form a 

shifting penumbra that animates and activates 

these works – an edge, yet not an edge, holding 

and caressing each work, allowing it to dissolve 

into the space beyond. 

What Bell has caught in these new works is that 

Richard Davey is an internationally published 

author, curator and member of the International 

‘Association of Art Critics’. He is a judge of the 

John Moores Painting Prize 2016 and recently 

wrote the major exhibition publication for Anselm 

Kiefer’s solo exhbiition at the Royal Academy of 

Arts, in 2014 alongside the 2015 and 20 16 ‘RA 

Summer Exhibition’ catalogues. 

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Bird 

mixed media on canvas and wood 

184 x 330 cm 

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5

6

Balance 


145 x 345 cm so shall 

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Swing Form 


215 x 185 cm 

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10

Two Blue Props 


220 x 112 cm 

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Blue Prop 


194 x 323 cm 

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14

Rolling Form 


155 x 230 cm 

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Wind Dance 1 

mixed media on wood . 90 x 107 cm 

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Wind Dance 2 


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Wind Dance 3 


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Wind Dance 4 


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Everyone wants to be first; no one wants to be 

last. Trevor Bell is often seen as the last of the 

great St Ives artists. Yet he is in many ways not 

a St Ives artist at all. A Yorkshireman, Bell first 

came to Cornwall in 1955, in the middle of St 

Ives’s great post-war modernist moment, at 

the suggestion of one of the key artists of the 

era, Terry Frost. The experience brought him 

into close contact with all the significant St Ives 

figures, gave him an umbilical link to pre-war 

constructivism via Ben Nicholson and Barbara 

Hepworth – and helped facilitate a meteoric 

rise through the London gallery circuit, which 

saw him described, by Patrick Heron, as Britain’s 

“best non-figurative painter under thirty ” in 

1958. Yet far from putting down permanent 

roots in the manner of many incoming artists, 

Bell soon returned to his home city Leeds, 

taking up a Gregory Fellowship at the 

university and becoming involved in radical 

educational developments at the city ’s art 

college. He subsequently spent twenty-five 

years teaching and working in America. 

Bell’s pivotal early epiphany came not in response 

to Cornwall’s light or landscape, but on a visit to 

Paris while a student at Leeds College of Art in 

the very early 1950s. In the Musee de l’Homme 

in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, Bell first saw 

African art: standing in practically the same spot 

in which Picasso had seen many of the same 

objects, in a different museum on the same site, 

forty-five years earlier. Looking into the “dusty 

cases”, appalled, yet fascinated by the powerful 

smell of the tropical wood and raffia, Picasso had 

observed that there was “everything” there. The 

young Bell, who had had barely any exposure to 

modern art, was impressed by the “the actual 

presence, the realness” of these objects – the 

severely abstracted form of a Dogon figure, 

for example, or the vital curves of a Basongye 

mask – by the fact that this art that wasn’t the 

representation of something, but a thing in its 

own right: “‘it’, as opposed to the illusion of ‘it’, 

the god itself, rather than the illusion of a god”. 

It was a moment that set Bell’s work on a 

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lifelong dialogue between painting as illusion 

and painting as object, painting as application 

and painting as fabrication; a tension which bore 

fruit in his shaped canvases of the early 1960s, 

and is still directly apparent in the powerful, 

yet wonderfully lyrical shaped works in this 

exhibition. Bell’s use of shaped canvases has 

been described as the element that most marks 

him out from the mainstream of St Ives art, 

that gives him at least as much in common with 

American post-painterly abstractionists such as 

Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly, as with the likes 

of Lanyon and Hilton. 

she paints,” as Bell is fond of observing. “How 

can you be here in this wind and rain and 

sunlight, and that not affect your work?” 

Trevor Bell is not a “Cornish artist”, but he is 

very much here in Cornwall. 

Mark Hudson, 2016 

But let’s not overstate Bell’s disconnectedness 

from something to which he is patently 

connected. Trevor Bell lived in Cornwall from 

1955 to 1960. He returned in 1996, and 

has lived here ever since. While his work is 

emphatically not of or about landscape, it is 

powerfully affected by the physical environment 

in which it is made – just as “what the artist ate for 

breakfast that morning must affect what he or 

Mark Hudson is an internationally published 

author and regular art and music critic for the 

Daily Telegraph, and has also written for The 

Observer, The Mail on Sunday, The Financial 

Times, The Sunday Times and The Guardian. 

His books include The Last Days of Titian, Our 

Grandmothers’ Drums, Coming Back Brockens 

and The Music in my Head. 

Shore 

mixed media on paper . 70 x 100 cm 

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Dance 1 


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Dance 2 


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Dance 3 


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Dance 4 


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Dance 5 


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Dance 6 


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Dance 7 


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Dance 8 


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Trevor Bell was born in Leeds in 1930. 

He was awarded a scholarship to attend The Leeds College of Art from 1947 to 1952 and, encouraged by Terry 

Frost, moved to Cornwall in 1955. St Ives was the epicentre for British abstract art being the home to artists such 

as Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon, Ben Nicholson, Naum Gabo, Barbara Hepworth and Terry Frost, he made his 

reputation as a leading member who helped establish British Art on the international stage. 

From these artists, especially Nicholson, Bell received advice and support. Nicholson, alongside his then dealer 

Charles Gimpel, encouraged him to show in London and Waddington Galleries gave Bell his first solo exhibition in 

1958. Patrick Heron wrote the introduction to the exhibition catalogue, 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 Fellowship in Painting at the University of Leeds so moved back to his hometown, 

Bell went on to become a Gregory Fellow at Leeds University. It was during this period that Bell developed his 

shaped canvases, setting his work apart from other artists of his generation. 

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 new work at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, 

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 in various locationseventually moving to Florida State University 

in 1976 to become the Professor for Master Painting. Here with the provision of a warehouse sized studio and 

time to really develop his painting he produced the large-scale, intensely coloured works for which he is known, 

reflecting the influence of the climate and landscape on him and his work. He went on to spend the next 20 years 

in America. Important exhibitions were held at the Corcoran Gallery and the Academy of Sciences in Washington, 

the Metropolitan Museum in Miami, The Cummer Gallery and the Museum of Art, 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, where he was again re-established as part of the St Ives artists movement. He 

moved back to Cornwall in 1996 which began his long-term relationship with the Millennium. 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 Gallery for 

their permanent collection. 

Bell has had works purchased and commissioned by numerous other international museums and public and private 

collections including (among others) The Arts Council of England, British Council, British Museum, Boca Raton, 

Laing Art Gallery, Ljubljana’s U.V.U Keleia Collection, The Perez Art Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum. 

Bell is twice a recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Council of Florida, an Honorary RWA from the Royal 

Western England Academy, An Honoury Fellow of University College Falmouth and an Emeritus Professorship by 

Florida State University. 

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Published by Anima-Mundi to coincide with the exhibition ‘Beyond the Edge’ by Trevor Bell 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or 

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Publication produced by Impact Printing Services (www.impactprintingservices.co.uk) 

Street-an-Pol . St. Ives . Cornwall . Tel: 01736 793121 . Email: mail@anima-mundi.co.uk . www.anima-mundi.co.uk

Trevor Bell ' Beyond the Edge

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