Profile - Trevor Purvis

Trevor is an artist who believes that the Australian countryside is a never-ending source of creative inspiration. Exploration and appreciation of the extreme nature of the Australian landscape from the deserts to the coastline, searching for moments of inspiration and wonderment. The subtle visual variants of light, colour and topography, unique to anywhere else in the world and well worth the observation and exploration.

Trevor’s bold use of colour and exaggerated mark-making is his signature approach to the Australian landscape. Using gestural brushwork, his loose and seemingly accidental style instinctively exaggerates the colour range onto the picture plane with bold aptitude, his rich layered painterly works challenging traditional landscape norms. Using bold colour interpretations of light, Trevor explores the variations of light and texture in an expressive and personal way.

Trevor completed his Graphic Art degree at the Natal College of Art in South Africa. This started a thirty year advertising career which took him to senior Creative positions in Johannesburg, Salisbury, London, Frankfurt, Sydney, Adelaide, Bangkok, New York, Tokyo, Melbourne, Abu Dhabi and most recently Moscow. His many international creative awards include the most prestigious Gold Lion at the Cannes Advertising Festival.

He discovered outback Australia after leaving advertising and attending the National Art School in Sydney, this in turn led he and his wife Beryl, on a two year off-road Australian odyssey which culminated in a successful solo exhibition at the Atwell Gallery in Perth.He now paints full-time at his studio in Cooroy surrounded by the verdant Noosa Hinterland. An intrepid traveller, Trevor continues his journeys around the Australian outback, painting smaller ‘en plein air’ works, as well as larger pieces back in the studio. He paints dozens of acrylic studies on paper and turns these studies into energetic landscapes back in his picturesque Maluti Studio.