"My mother was a big one for RP, so it's always been a great sadness to me that I don't have a proper Yorkshire accent," says Trevor Bell.

He needn't be so sad. Decades living in Cornwall as part of the St Ives School, teaching at American universities and trekking around the mountains of India and Kashmir haven't dulled his accent as much as he might think.

The voice is unmistakably Yorkshire. As is the warmth and the straight-forwardness of the artist.

"So, what do you think?" he asks, with a smile that can only, as inappropriate a description as it is for a 78-year-old man, be described as cheeky.

"It's a bit different isn't it."

He then turns to the Yorkshire Post photographer and, with the same twinkle in his eye, says: "Think you'll be able to get anything out of that?"

Bell is having a lot of fun. He knows that people may have to grapple a little harder with his newest work which is now on display at the Leeds University gallery.

Nothing Extra features his trademark shaped canvases, but a minimalist sense of colour. The pale whites which dominate the canvas are occasionally interrupted with bold additions of black or deep purples, but they are as blank as possible.

Layla Bloom, who has brought the exhibition to the gallery, tells me before Bell arrives that among his many inspirations for the series was Buddhist philosophy.

"Well, I don't want to talk too much about that really," says the reticent artist.

"I think if you start putting too much of that onto your own work it just gets a bit distracting and... whatever.

"One of the things I will say is that it is very hard not to put in anything extra. When you have been practicing as long as I have, there are all sorts of techniques and tricks that you might use, but I wanted to see what I could do if only allowed myself the smallest set of terms."

Bell is right when he says there are plenty of tricks up his sleeve that he could have revealed. Born in Leeds in 1930, he studied at Leeds College of Art.

In the manner of artists of the day, upon graduation he followed the sound of other artist and loudest noise was coming from Cornwall. He jumped in a van and travelled to the English coast where he met influential artists such as Terry Frost and Patrick Heron – and where he became a part of the movement known as the St Ive's School.

"It was such an inspiring and wonderful place to be."

In 1958, Bell staged his first solo show, at Waddington's Gallery in London. He was an overnight sensation. Lauded as "the best non-figurative painter under 30 in Britain", a year after the exhibition he was awarded the Paris Biennale International Painting Prize. In 1960, he returned to Leeds to take on the Gregory Fellow in Painting.

"That was a wonderful time in my life, to be back here and in the university, surrounded by these young, energetic people and doing my work," says Bell.

Today, he stands in the newly refurbished Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery at the university and is happy to simply say: "I have been very lucky."

The exhibition coincides with the launch of a new biography of the artist and for curator Bloom the whole process of selecting works was a labour of love.

"I travelled down to Cornwall, where Trevor now lives, to meet him in his workshop," she says. "He allowed me to choose whichever works I thought would be good to exhibit in the gallery and this collection immediately stood out to me.

"I saw them amid the joyful and brightly coloured shaped canvases. They contrasted so greatly with the rest of his oeuvre that they demanded further attention."

Bloom, more eager to explain than Bell himself, says he set himself a challenge to pare his work back to bare essentials. No colours, only black and white.

She says: "Form, shape, line and texture alone would for his palette, testing his means of expression to the limits."

For his part Bell is delighted to simply be back in Leeds.

n The exhibition of Bell's work, Nothing Extra, is at Leeds University's Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery, open to the public, until Mar 27. Bell's work can also be now seen at the Leeds City Art Gallery as part of a display looking at the impact of the Leeds Gregory Fellowship, which ran at the University from 1950 to 1980 and allowed artists to work in the city.

Trevor Bell, the biography, is published by Sansom and Company.


Trevor Bell: A life in art

1930: Born in Leeds

1950s: Bell moved to Cornwall to work.

1958: Debut one man show at the Waddington Galleries in London.

1959: Awarded the Bienalle de Paris International Painting Prize.

1960: Awarded Italian government scholarship.

1960–1963: Awarded Gregory Fellow Scholarship, Leeds Univesity.

1970: Retrospective in Scotland, Ireland and England.

1973: Major one-man show at Whitechapel Gallery, London.

1973: Moves to Tallahassee, Florida, to establish a studio and become professor of painting at Florida University. During this time he continued to travel and exhibit around the world, with his work in galleries including in New York at the Tate in London.

1996: Returned to live and work in Cornwall, where he is still based.