Tevor Bell was born in Leeds in 1930 and studied at the Leeds College of Art. In the early 1950s he was a leading member of the artists working in St. Ives. In 1958 he exhibited in a one-man show at the Waddington Galleries in London. He was awarded the Biennale de Paris International Painting Prize and an Italian Government Scholarship. He later became a Gregory fellow in painting at Leeds University.

A large retrospective in Scotland, Ireland and England in 1970 and a major one-man show at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1973, Bell established a studio in Tallahassee, Florida where he worked as Professor of Painting at the Florida State University. He has also lived and worked in England, France, Italy and Canada. He has been a regular exhibitor in private galleries in Miami, Atlanta and Chicago, and has works purchased and commissioned in numerous international museums, public and private collections, including Deutsche Bank and the Yale Center for British Art.


He returned to the UK in 1996 and has exhibited two large-scale paintings at the Tate Gallery, St Ives, and in 2000 held a major exhibition at the North Light Gallery in Huddersfield. His home and studios were for many years near Penzance, Cornwal