Carol Sutton (artist)


Carol Lorraine Sutton is a multidisciplinary artist born in Norfolk, Virginia, USA and now living in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She is an award-winning painter whose works on canvas and paper have been shown in 32 solo exhibits as well as being included in 94 group shows. Her work, which ranges from complete abstraction to the use of organic and architectural images, relates to the formalist ideas of Clement Greenberg and is noted for the use of color. Some of Sutton paintings have been related to ontology.

Early life and education

The daughter of Robert William Sutton, a designer and manufacturer of marine instruments and Nancy Chester Sustare, artist and homemaker, Carol spent her first six years living in a log cabin high on the sand dunes of Chesapeake Bay overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. She won a blue ribbon for her art in the Junior Section at the Sears-Allstate Tidewater Arts Festival. She received two Virginia Museum Fellowships and studied at Richmond Professional Institute in Richmond, earning a BFA in 1967 along with a Gold Key and Art Achievement Award and a scholarship to attend the 'School of Visual Arts' in New York City.
Sutton received two teaching fellowships which allowed her to attend the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where her professors introduced her to the work of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. In 1969 she graduated with a Masters of Fine Art degree.

Early career

In 1967, when Sutton was twenty-two, her work entered the Jacob Kainen Collection, of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art with a portfolio of sixteen serigraphs titled 'The Artist As A Young Woman - Picabia'. Thinking that her artistic goals and the materials she used were similar to those of Eva Hesse, Will Insley, Sutton's professor at UNCG, introduced the two women in 1969 in his New York loft. That year a large scale sculpture she created was purchased by 'Weatherspoon Art Gallery', Greensboro, N.C.
Working on large sculpture in the isolation of her studio in Greensboro, North Carolina Sutton was offered a solo show of these works at The O.K. Harris Gallery in New York. However, she instead moved to Canada and married the sculptor André Fauteux with whom she has two children, Viva-Laura Sutton-Fauteux and Yale Sutton-Fauteux.
While working in Canada, Sutton was awarded Ontario Arts Council grants in 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, and 1979. She received a bursary and two travel grants from the Canada Council for the Arts between 1983 and 1992.
In Canada Sutton produced multiple exhibitions across Canada and showed with the Theo Waddington Galleries, and later at Gallery One in Toronto. In Toronto, Sutton also did sculpture collaborations with contemporary electronic music composers. In Canada Sutton's work received positive reviews from critics Clement Greenberg and Karen Wilkin, and was influenced by the artists Anthony Caro and Helen Frankenthaler, all of whom regularly came to her Toronto studio. Fauteux introduced Sutton to Jack Bush in 1974 and has been included in a number of exhibitions related to Bush's influence.
In 1977, Sutton presented her first Canadian exhibition at the A.C.T. Gallery. In 1978 Sutton held her first New York one-woman show at the William Edward O'Reilly Gallery. In the U.S.A. Sutton's work was noted by critic Kenworth Moffett, the Contemporary Curator of The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, who purchased her work 'Alvertie' for their collection and included her in the André Emmerich Gallery touring show, The New Generation: A Curator's Choice.
Eight years after she left, Sutton returned to New York to show as an artist, this time as a painter not a sculptor. There she received an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant.

Later career

Sutton became known for her large scale abstract acrylic paintings, which she painted with canvas laid directly on the floor. Related to the tradition of Color Field Painting her art has been linked by critics to the art movement called Lyrical Abstraction. Her smaller paper works often take on unusual structural forms and have widely extended edges, sometimes cut in wave shapes. Sutton was encouraged by critic Michael Fried whom she met 1n 1986 at Triangle Artist Workshop. In 1987 Sutton was invited to participate in the Art Triangle Workshop in Barcelona, her third Triangle workshop. Two years later a Canada Council Grant allowed her to again travel to Europe to photograph and study ironwork throughout Spain and France. The experience resulted in a series of paintings titled 'THE SPIRIT BALCONY PAINTINGS'. Roald Nasgaard, in his book 'Abstract Painting in Canada', writes of the artist, "Always a fluid and luscious painter of great gusto, comfortable with intimacy as well as the grand scale."

Major group exhibitions