William Sutton

William Alexander (Bill) Sutton, CBE (1917-2000) is an iconic Canterbury artist, whose work was chosen as a major retrospective to mark the opening of the Christchurch Art Gallery in 2003. Trained at the Canterbury University College School of Art in the 1930s, Bill Sutton travelled overseas and served during the Second World War before returning to the University where he taught for more than 30 years. Sutton was also a skilled calligrapher, printmaker, designer and bookbinder, and a teacher whose work influenced many contemporary New Zealand painters. He spent most of his life in Canterbury, and was inspired by its varied landscape. His ‘Plantation series’ of paintings, done later in his career, were intended to express disapproval of the large exotic pine forests, showing them as ‘scabs’ on the landscape. Sutton grew up at a time when Canterbury was mainly grassland – but in fact it had originally been covered in forest.