William T. Ayton Biography

William T. Ayton

William T. Ayton was born and raised in Yorkshire, in the north of England. After showing an early aptitude for drawing and painting, he went on to study Fine Arts at Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland. He began exhibiting in earnest in Madrid, Spain where he lived for several years. Also in Madrid, he met his future wife, Diana, and seeking to combine their interests in visual expression and social justice, they began to collaborate on an illumination of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The exhibition first existed as a series of thirty drawings (one for each Article) that were exhibited in 1991 in England (University of Essex), Holland (Peace Palace, The Hague) and Krakow, Poland (Jagiellonian UniversitySummer School).

A series of thirty paintings was then created and shown at the Universal Expo in Seville, Spain in 1992, along with thirty 3-D computer animations displayed on a monitor. In 1993, the exhibition of paintings was shown at The Palais des Nations of the United Nations in Geneva for the 45th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The artist & his family (which now includes their daughter, Sarah) currently reside in Brooklyn, New York. He continues to paint in a figurative style, dealing with the human condition at the end of the 20th century, intertwined with mythological subject matter and more contemporary issues.