Norman Toynton

In 2006, he returned to England for good, building himself a studio at his home on the North Norfolk coast. His work has since been shown at ArtSpace and several other London venues, as well as at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

In 1969, Toynton became the visiting artist at Ohio State University in America; he was then Chairman of the Art Department at the University of Victoria. Later he moved to Boston and became Chair of Fine Art at the Massachusetts College of Art.

Toynton was a member of 56 Group Wales from 1967 to 1971.

In the early 60s, Toynton was part of the first British Pop Art exhibition at the Grabowski Gallery and participated in the first London happening with Carolee Schneemann at Dennison Hall. He was included in the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition, and created an installation piece for the Raume und Environmenten exhibition at the Morsbroich Museum in Leverkusen with Klaus Rinke. He also showed at the Zwemmer Gallery (with John Walker), the RBA Galleries, and numerous other galleries throughout the UK. He began teaching under the radical art educator Tom Hudson at the Leicester College of Art in 1963 and then joined Hudson at the Cardiff College of Art. Working with Hudson, along with Michael Sandle, Terry Setch and Michael Tyzack, was a formative experience for him. Meanwhile, he'd become increasingly interested in the art coming out of America, particularly after the Jackson Pollock show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1958, and his work was tending more towards abstraction.

Norman Toynton (born 25 January 1939, in London) is a British abstract painter who lived for many years in America, where his work was acclaimed for its 'grand visual and tactile splendour' and for 'marshal(ling) all the sensuous force of color and oil paint to induce us to look with truly questioning attention'. He was the Chair of Fine Arts at the Massachusetts College of Art and exhibited widely in New York and Boston. In 2006 he returned to England, where he lives and works on the North Norfolk coast and is currently in an exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Born in London in 1939, Toynton's home was destroyed by bombing during the war and he spent his early childhood in a series of temporary accommodations. His father was a navigator's yeoman in the Royal Navy, where he served on the Arctic convoys. When he was 15, Toynton enrolled in the Hornsey College of Art; at 16, he had a painting accepted into the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. He went on to study at the Royal College of Art, where he won the top painting prize in his first year. His classmates included David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, and Allen Jones. His first trip to the museums in Paris was with Allen Jones and Ken Kiff, his second with David Hockney.