Norman was born to Scottish parents in Trinidad in 1926. He decided to pursue a career in painting and it quickly became his life’s work. Norman attended Glasgow School of Art, where he laid the foundation for his painting style: one that evolved and developed until his passing at the age of ninety-three in 2019.

In 1967 the Upper Grosvenor Gallery mounted Norman’s first solo exhibition. The same year, Vogue magazine published a feature on his work entitled The Loneliness of the Long Distance Painter. In 1974 Norman’s work was the subject of a BBC film as part of a series of arts programmes entitled SCOPE, presented by the critic and writer W. Gordon Smith. The broadcast coincided with his solo show in the Edinburgh Talbot Rice Center. In his lifetime, Norman presented fourteen solo shows, in addition to many group exhibitions.

Norman’s paintings depict his family and friends, seizing on the vitality of the young and their modes. The models changed over time as his four sons were born, grew up, formed relationships, and more recently, had children of their own. His highly structured images are given form with the use of decorative pattern and vivid color, creating a synthesis between figure and space. He said, “I try to make each colour and shape enhance every other colour and shape so it’s entirely satisfactory, so it’s at peace.”

His later work continued to deal with the same pictorial concerns, but omitted the human figure for the first time. Norman’s subject became the planter-cultivated back-yard of his Victorian town-house in Glasgow.

Technically, the paintings are prepared with meticulous attention to the materials and methods used. The oil paint is applied to a traditional, semi absorbent, chalk ground on rigid board, which best maintains the colour and the permanence of the pigment. The fidelity and lasting appeal of Norman Gilbert’s impressive life’s work is thus assured.