Keith Sutton

At the end of the fifties Sutton was living in University Mansions, Putney and then for a while in the house of Ronald Alley, the art historian, in Deodar Road.

He continued to write art criticism during the first half of the sixties: for The New Statesman; for The Listener (alternating with David Sylvester) and also, anonymously, for The Times.

He wrote several introductions in catalogues of artists' exhibitions: the sculptor George Fullard;[2] Derek Hirst;[3] Thomas Erma,[4] and Trevor Bates.

[6] In 1965 he was put in charge of the arts section of the newly launched magazine London Life, continuing until it ceased publication two years later.

In 1960 he had stayed with Victor Willing and Paula Rego in Portugal and he felt that the new experiences of sea and landscape infused the smaller still lifes among the paint and collage works on which he now embarked.

Sutton had formed a close friendship with Tom Erma and was devastated when he heard of his never-fully-explained death from gunshot wounds in Paris in 1964, aged only 25.

In 1967 his life was further disrupted as the house in Winchester Road was due for demolition to allow the construction of the Swiss Cottage library and swimming baths.

While there he continued to create collages, in a developing and less hard edge style, but eventually started on so-called 'motif' paintings in acrylics.

Concurrently and subsequently he worked in gouache or watercolour on paper to produce a series of more than twenty brilliantly coloured small abstracts, sometimes titled, usually not.

The edges of each form cut like a knife yet the final effect is not coldly purposeful', Eric Newton, The Guardian, 5 September 1962.

At first sight his collages look severely classical, architectural rather than pictorial in feeling; on closer inspection they reveal ambiguities of space, rich varieties of colour and texture, and a complex interdependence of fragmented forms', Norbert Lynton, Art International.