Norman Toynton

Norman Toynton was born in 1939, at St. Bart’s Hospital in London, which entitled him to call himself a Cockney. In the last year of the war, while his father was on the Arctic convoys to Minsk, a V2 destroyed the building in which he and his mother were living, and they were almost killed.

By then – he was six -- he was already drawing obsessively. After the war, when the government was moving him and his parents from one lodging house to another, he started lugging an easel to Hampstead Heath on weekends and painting the landscape. He also spent whole Saturdays in Kenwood House and the National Gallery, where he fell in love with Van Dyck’s portrait of Cornelius van der Geest and discovered Cezanne, who became the greatest lifelong influence on his art.

At age 15, he entered the Hornsey College of Art and at 18 had a painting accepted for the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. He then went to the Royal College of Art, where he won first prize in the painting competition (David Hockney came in second); he was later expelled, however, along with Allen Jones, for rebelling against what the critic Mark Hudson has called the ‘sub-Sickertian realism’ practiced by the college’s conservative professors and seeking out new styles of painting. In 1962, he was included, along with Allen Jones and Hockney, in ‘Image in Progress’ at the Grabowski Gallery, the first pop art show in London.

Norman Toynton and Allen Jones - 2017

While teaching at the Leicester College of Art and the Cardiff College of Art, his work was shown in numerous exhibitions in London and Liverpool and Cardiff, as well as in Germany and other European countries, winning prizes in Switzerland and in Italy. Paintings of his from the 1960’s are in the collections of the Nottingham City Museum, Bradford’s Cartwright Museum, the National Library of Wales, and the Angueddfa Cymru.

In 1969, he went to America, travelling around the country as a visiting artist at various universities in the west and the Midwest. He then served as chair of the art department at the University of Victoria, in Canada, and later as head of the graduate programme in fine art at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. During this period, he became fascinated by the idea of using Masonite pegboard as a ground for his painting; in an article for the College Art Association Journal, he wrote of ‘redeeming’ this most sterile, mass-produced material, an emblem of everything dehumanizing about the 20th century, with lush paint and colour and patterning.

He started creating large installations with pegboard for solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Williams College Art Gallery, the Rose Art Museum, and the Whitechapel Gallery in London. He then began making smaller pegboard works, as either single paintings or in series; on some, he hung elaborately painted wooden frames; for others, he covered the pegboard with thickly impastoed paint. These individual works were shown in half a dozen commercial galleries in Boston and New York, and bought for both private and public collections, including Time Warner, JP Morgan Chase, the Alfonso Ossorio Foundation, and the Rose Art Museum.

He was praised by reviewers in Art in America, the Boston Phoenix, the Boston Herald, Art New England, and ARTnews. (“Toynton’s new abstract paintings on pegboard are work of such authenticity that they’re shocking. In an age of neo-this and retro-that, we are out of practice looking at the real thing, and almost have to learn to see again”). He was also the subject of a feature article in Artforum, in which the critic Kenneth Baker wrote, ‘'I know of few abstract painters who have the patience and intelligence to practice their art deliberately enough to let us see painting for the thinking process it is. One of the most accomplished of these is Norman Toynton.”

Zed - 24” x 24” - 2015

Beginning in the 90’s, he made several trips to India, where the brilliant colour he saw all around him found its way into his paintings, some of which also contained commonplace objects such as egg boxes and even urinals, which he transformed into brightly patterned protrusions from the pegboard base.

In 2006, after a period of seclusion at his studio in the mountains of northern Vermont, he returned to England for good, apart from periodic trips to India and Greece, and settled on the North Norfolk coast. During the following years, his work was shown at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the Royal Academy, the Art Space Gallery, APT, and, in 2017, in a solo show at the Dadiani Gallery on Cork Street. At this time, he had begun work on a series of black-and-white paintings, some of which were purchased by private collectors, while others were left unfinished at his death.

He died at his home in Norfolk in June 2025. Link to obituary: www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/sep/15/norman-toynton-obituary