Carol Sutton

Carol Lorraine Sutton (born September 3, 1945) is a multidisciplinary artist born in Norfolk, Virginia, USA and now living in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She is a 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 (VCU) 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 (UNCG), 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.