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.
[2] 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.
[3] Sutton received two teaching fellowships which allowed her to attend the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG),[5] where her professors introduced her to the work of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.
[citation needed] 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.
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.
Roald Nasgaard, in 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.