BG 127
SIR TERRY FROST RA
Leamington Spa 1915 – 2003 Cornwall
Blues
Signed, dated August ‘69 and inscribed with the title on the reverse
Canvas: 72 x 72 in / 182.9 x 182.9 cm
Framed size: 75 ½ x 75 ½ in / 191.8 x 191.8 cm
Provenance:
Private collection, Europe
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Frost produced a succession of large works in which he experimented with the rhythm of the semicircle and the range of tones which could be extracted from one colour. ‘Although C- and D- shapes had been part of his vocabulary since the abstracts of 1950-51, by the late 1960s they were taking on new roles. As part of his exploration of the possibilities opened up by his work with colour…Frost found himself using repeated series of D-shapes to carry colour across the canvas. He was also intrigued by the intervening shapes and the rhythms they set up. Two large-scale D-shapes, almost touching, and pairs of large tilted quadrants – both reminiscent of the boat-like shapes of earlier work and also related to the bikini images - had appeared before but now they were transformed, enlarged and sharpened: harder-edged, harder-coloured’ (D Lewis, Terry Frost, Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2000, p. 113).
These simple flat forms, stripped of their allusive meaning and reduced to large areas of pure colour on a large scale, envelop and absorb the viewer, perhaps as a result of the work of American artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, whom Frost had seen in New York during his first one-man show at the Bertha Schaeffer Gallery in 1960. ‘[By the mid-1960s] I knew I had to do some large paintings, for my own sake: maybe I was ambitious to go to the States; it is essential to find out what can happen when you work big. I had done Red, black and white small and I wanted to do it again on a scale that would really surround you. At that time in my life I could paint on the floor, so I would stand to make semicircles which were drawn by my body. You couldn’t do that on an easel because you would plan it too much if you did’ (Terry Frost, referring to Red, Black, White, 1967, cat, 28, Terry Frost: Six Decades, Royal Academy of Arts, ex. cat., London, 2000, p.52).
SIR TERRY FROST RA
Leamington Spa 1915 – 2003 Cornwall
Terence Ernest Manitou Frost was born into a working class family on 13th October 1915 in Leamington Spa. Brought up by his grandparents, Frost was educated at Rugby Road School before attending Leamington Spa Central School from 11 to 14 years of age. After leaving school in 1930 he worked in various jobs. From 1932 to 1939, having joined the Territorial Army, he worked at Armstrong Whitworth in Coventry painting the wings of fighter planes and bombers. He was called up with the Army Reserve in 1939 and served in France, Palestine and Lebanon. After joining the Commandos he fought in Crete, where he was captured in 1941. As a prisoner of war he was interned in camps in Salonika and Poland, ending up in Stalag 383 in Bavaria. Encouraged by the young artist Adrian Heath, Frost began to draw and paint portraits of his fellow POWs.
Following his return to Britain in 1945, Frost married Kathleen May Clarke and attended evening classes at Birmingham Art College. In 1946 he moved with his wife and child to Cornwall where they lived in a caravan before moving into a house in Quay Street, St Ives. At the suggestion of Adrian Heath he studied at Leonard Fuller’s St Ives School of Painting. From 1947 to 1950 Frost studied at Camberwell School of Art on an ex-serviceman’s grant. While attending traditional life classes with William Coldstream, Frost was strongly influenced by the advice and work of Victor Pasmore, who urged him to skip life class in order to spend time looking at paintings in the National Gallery. With Pasmore’s guidance, he produced his first abstract painting in 1949 based on the poem Madrigal by W.H. Auden.
In 1950 Frost worked as an assistant to Barbara Hepworth on her sculpture for the Festival of Britain, Contrapuntal Forms. He taught a life drawing class at Bath Academy of Art, Corsham from 1952-4, where William Scott was head of painting and where Heath, Wynter and Lanyon also taught. In 1954 Frost was awarded a Gregory Fellowship at Leeds University and moved his family there
while teaching at the Leeds School of Art until 1957. In 1960 he visited America for the first time and through the critic Clement Greenberg he met some of the leading U.S. painters of the day including Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell. In 1962 Frost and his family moved to Banbury and he taught part-time at Coventry Art College. He was made Artist in Residence at the Fine Art department of Newcastle University in 1964, became a full time lecturer at Reading University in 1965 and went on to become Professor of Painting there from 1977 to 1981. Frost moved to Newlyn, Cornwall in 1974. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1992 and was knighted in 1998.