Terry Frost 1915 - 2003

Terry Frost was born in Leamington Spa, England in 1915. He served in the army during WWII when he was held prisoner of war between 1941-5. He began painting in prisoner of war camps and studied art at St Ives School of Painting and at Camberwell School of Art (1946-9). He was studio assistant in St Ives to Barbara Hepworth in 1951 before taking a teaching post at Bath Academy of Art in 1952. He became the Gregory Fellow at Leeds University from 1954-56 and moved to Banbury in 1963 and taught at Reading University. Terry Frost returned to Newlyn in Cornwall in 1974 and died there in 2003.

works in the collection - 4

PAC/034

Frost used collage extensively during the early 1950s as means of developing his interest in non-representational imagery. Frost had a studio in St Ives close to Nicholson at the time and was friends with the artists Peter Lanyon and Sven Berlin. Frost visited the USA for the first time in 1960, spending three weeks in New York. Seeing work by Barnett Newman and Ad Riendhart made a lasting impression upon Frost and precedes the increase in scale that characterised his works of the 1960s.

Collage, 1950


PAC/035

Frost describes the experience of seeing the Yorkshire dales in winter as an inspiration for this work. Snow flattened his perspective and created an irregular lattice of the dry stone walls of the fields. The image is a response to Frost's sense of being dwarfed by the landscape.

Red, Black and White, 1955-6


PAC/036

At this time, Frost used coloured 'wedges' to tighten his imagery. This compositional device generates tension by penetrating the boundaries between adjacent forms. In this work a red wedge pierces the image from the upper edge creating formal and chromatic contrast.

Red and Blue, 1959


PAC/037

The composition is balanced on the right by black and white wedges that enter the image from the top and bottom respectively. Living and working in St Ives, Frost made a number of paintings at this time that simplified his previously complex compositional style.

Black and Orange, 1959