About
Biography
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 pursuits. 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 encountered a more expressive, poetic, 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. Alongside exhibiting, Abigail also runs painting workshops, and writes a Substack publicaton about painting.
Philosophy
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 distil 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 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 in order to recontextualise modern life.
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 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.
Education
2024/present – The North London Group – Intensive Programme
2021/2024 – The Barnes Atelier – Core Studio Programme
2019/2021 – The London School of Geometry and Number Theory (Imperial, UCL, KCL) – PhD
2015/2019 – The University of Oxford – MMath Mathematics – First Class
Awards
Art
The Hudson River Fellowship– 3 week plein air painting residency in Connecticut – 2026
Behind The Artist – Highly Commended by Judge Frances Featherstone – 2026
Art in the Open Quick Draw Competition – 3rd place – 2025
The London Sketch Club Life Drawing Prize – 2025
Royal Institute of Oil Painters Paint Live – 3rd place – 2024
Art Renewal Center Finalist – 2024
Lunar Codex – A painting included in a time capsule placed by NASA on the moon – 2024
Art in the Open Quick Draw Competition – 3rd place – 2024
The Hudson River Fellowship – 3 week plein air painting residency in Connecticut – 2024
Highly Commended by the De Laszlo Foundation – Royal Portrait Society exhibition – 2023
Maths
EPSRC award to study for the Doctor of Philosophy in Mathematics – 2019-2023
Book Prize – St Peters College, Oxford – 2019
Charles Caine Mathematics Prize – St Peter’s College, Oxford – 2019
Undergraduate Research Bursary – London Mathematical Society – 2018
Undergraduate Research Bursary – Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford – 2017
Academic Scholarship – St Peter’s College Oxford – 2016/17/18
Media
Links to Maths Publications and Talks
L. Krause, A. M. Burton, N. T. Fadai, and R. A. Van Gorder, Emergent structures in
reaction-advection-diffusion systems on a sphere, Physical Review E 97 (2018) 042215
R. A. Van Gorder, A. L. Krause, F. Brosa Planella, and A. M. Burton, Coupled complex
Ginzburg-Landau systems with saturable nonlinearity and asymmetric cross-phase
modulation, Annals of Physics 396 (2018) 397-428
Van Gorder, Robert & Krause, Andrew & Planella, Ferran & Burton, Abigail. (2017). Dynamics from a coupled complex Ginzburg-Landau system with saturable nonlinearity. 10.48550/arXiv.1710.07968.
The application of Emerton’s functor of ordinary parts to Hida Theory
Mod p and integral p-adic representations of GLn(Qp)
Upcoming and Current Exhibitions
Royal Hibernian Academy – RHA Gallery, Ireland – 25th May to 9th August 2026
The Royal Society of British Artists ‘Rising Stars’ Exhibition – The Royal Overseas League – 28th May to June 2026
The New English Art Club Annual Exhibition – The Mall Galleries – 11th June to 20th June 2026
Chelsea Art Society – Chelsea Town Hall – 16th June to 21st June 2026
Kindred Open Studios – The Gramophone Works – 27th and 28th June 2026
Hampstead Art Society– Gallery 8, St James – 5th July to 12th July
Past Exhibitions
2026
‘A Scattering of Clouds’ – Group Show at The Gallery at Green and Stone
Royal Society of British Artists – The Mall Galleries
Works on Paper – The Gallery at Green and Stone
2025
Hampstead Art Society Works on Paper – Regents Park Gallery
A Small Winter – The Point Contemporary
Discerning Eye – Mall Galleries
The Little Picture Show – Highgate Contemporary
Winter Exhibition – The London Sketch Club
The Royal Society of Marine Artists – Mall Galleries
Wells Art Contemporary – Wells Cathedral
North London Group Annual Exhibition – Regent’s Park Gallery
Highgate Contemporary Art Summer Exhibition – Online
Green and Stone Summer Exhibition – The Gallery at Green and Stone
Art in the Open – Greenacres Gallery, Wexford
Chelsea Art Society– Chelsea Old Town Hall
Hampstead Art Society– Online
The London Sketch Club Spring Exhibition – The London Sketch Club
Society of Graphic Fine Art – The Mall Galleries
Works on Paper – The Gallery at Green and Stone
2024
Royal Institute of Oil Painters – The Mall Galleries
Hudson River Fellowship Exhibition – The Salmagundi Club, New York
The Almenara Art Prize – Online
Green and Stone Summer Exhibition – The Gallery at Green and Stone
Art in the Open – Green Acres Gallery, Wexford
The Barnes Atelier Summer Exhibition – Fletcher and Seymour Gallery
Hampstead Art Society – Online
The Society of Women Artists – The Mall Galleries
Chelsea Art Society – Chelsea Old Town Hall
Works on Paper – The Gallery at Green and Stone
2023
Royal Institute of Oil Painters – Mall Galleries
Discerning Eye – Mall Galleries
Green and Stone Summer Exhibition – The Gallery at Green and Stone
Art in the Open – Green Acres Gallery, Wexford
Chelsea Art Society – Chelsea Old Town Hall
Bath Society of Artists – Victoria Art Gallery
The Royal Society of Portrait Painters – Mall Galleries – ‘Highly Commended’ by the de Laszlo Foundation
Works on Paper – The Gallery at Green and Stone
Society of Scottish Artists – Royal Scottish Academy