Norman Gilbert

Norman Gilbert was born in Trinidad to Scottish parents and grew up in Troon, Ayrshire. After having served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, he studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1948 to 1952. Gilbert’s paintings are defined by vivid colour, intricate pattern, and a harmonious balance between figure and space. A painter of considerable sensitivity, he centred his work around his own domestic life; providing both an intimate and inviting insight into an otherwise hidden world.

Over the course of a career spanning more than seventy years, Gilbert’s work was widely exhibited; he had fourteen solo shows, as well as featuring in multiple group exhibitions. In 1967, the Upper Grosvenor Gallery mounted his first solo exhibition, and in the same year Vogue magazine published a feature on his work, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Painter. In 1974, Gilbert’s work was the subject of a BBC film as part of a series of arts programmes entitled SCOPE, which coincided with his solo show in the Edinburgh Talbot Rice Gallery. His final exhibition, held posthumously at Tramway, Glasgow, in 2022, celebrated his remarkable career and enduring contribution to Scottish painting.