Abigail’s representational work is driven by a deep curiosity about visual phenomena and her own responses to them. She investigates the ways we filter and process reality – through imagination, symbolism, and the idiosyncratic ways we interpret colour and space. Rather than painting literally, she seeks to distill a scene, uncovering its poetry through composition and revealing the subject indirectly rather than descriptively.

Grounded in traditional techniques and direct observation from life, Abigail’s practice is rooted in the complexity of human perception. She believes that, in both art and mathematics, the most beautiful results emerge from reality itself, and that mastery of its fundamental principles is essential before breaking or reimagining them. Her work also engages in dialogue with art history, drawing depth from past traditions while exploring the unique capacities of painting today.

For Abigail, mathematics and art are closely aligned: both are creative pursuits in search of truth. She sees abstraction and simplification not as reductions but as pathways to deeper insight, with individuality revealed in how each person deviates from or reshapes the pattern.

Her mathematical background informs her artistic approach. She prizes technical precision, balanced with intuition, analysis, and perseverance – approaching each painting as she would a mathematical problem, through a rigorous yet imaginative exploration of possibilities.

Abigail Burton is a classically trained oil painter from London.

Born in 1997, she grew up immersed in her grandmother’s paintings and developed an early passion for drawing. Her childhood aboard a houseboat on the Thames, followed by long coastal walks after moving to East Sussex as a teenager, nurtured a deep appreciation of natural beauty.

Alongside art, Abigail was also drawn to the beauty of mathematics. She studied this at the University of Oxford, completing a master’s degree in 2019 before embarking on a PhD at Imperial College London.Yet her love for painting gradually eclipsed her academic pusuits. In 2021, she chose to leave academia and devote herself fully to her artistic practice.

Abigail trained in classical realism at the Barnes Atelier where she learned to craft meticulous studio works. She later joined the North London Group, where she encounted a more expressive, poetric, and perceptual approach to painting. This dual influence continues to shape her practice, which ranges across figure, still life, and landscape, and she continues to study through careful transcriptions of masterworks from art history.

 Her art has been showcased in numerous prestigious exhibitions about the UK and internationally, including with The Royal Society of Portrait Painters, The Royal Institute of Oil Painters, the Discerning Eye, Society of Graphic Fine Art, The Royal Society of Marine Artists and The Society of Women Artists exhibitions at the Mall Galleries, and several times with The Chelsea Art Society, The Society of Scottish Artists, The Bath Society of Artists, The Gallery at Green and Stone, and in the Salmagundi Club in New York.