SIR TERRY FROST  RA   1915 - 2003

Born in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, Frost first began to paint during the four years that he spent as a prisoner of war in Germany when he met the artist Adrian Heath, who persuaded him to become an artist in his own right.  

On his return to England Frost moved to St Ives and studied under Leonard Fuller (1946) before attending the Camberwell School of Art in London (1947 – 50) under Victor Pasmore, Ben Nicholson and Peter Lanyon.   It was at this point that his art moved into abstraction from the Euston Road Group realist tradition.  After Camberwell, Frost moved back to St Ives and worked as Barbara Hepworth’s assistant on Contrapuntal Forms (1951) for the Festival of Britain.

Frost taught at the Bath Academy of Art at Corsham Court (1952), the Gregory Fellow at Leeds University (1954 – 56), the Leeds School of Art (1956 – 57), artist in Residence at the Fine Art Department of Newcastle University (1964), a full time lecturer for the Department of Fine Art at Reading University (1965) and became Professor of Painting at the University of Reading (1977 – 81).  

Frost held his first solo exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in 1952. He continued to exhibit regularly in London, and his first international one-man show was held in 1961 at the Bertha Schaeffer Gallery, New York. Further solo exhibitions include the ICA, London (1971) and the Serpentine Gallery, London (1976). A retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Mayor Gallery, London in 1990, and a major retrospective, Terry Frost: Six Decades, was held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2000.

Frost was one of the forerunners of abstract painting in Britain, and his use of vivid colours can be traced back to his time as a prisoner, almost in antithesis of the drab, dull world in which he found himself. He believed the experience left him with a ‘heightened perception’ of the world, which encouraged him to paint. Painting and printmaking were always at the centre of his work and Frost considered them inseparable, with one medium creating ideas for the other.

Frost’s early work was figurative, though it included objects simplified into coloured shapes. Frost's first non-representational work was Madrigal (1949), in which he conveyed emotion through a formal pictorial language of coloured rectangles, triangles and diamonds. It was while he was in Leeds (1956) that works, such as Blue Winter (1956) were inspired by his desire to create an ‘abstract image-equivalence’ for his experiences that was inspired by the Tate gallery’s show of American Abstract Expressionists. Although Frost's work rejected specific images, he slowly built up a vocabulary of signs- chevrons, discs, crescents, arrowheads, lozenges, triangles, spirals, horizontal shafts.

Frost was a tremendously influential force in British and to quote the owner of the Badcock Gallery, Cornwall on Frost’s death, ‘his unique ability to allow the joy of life to emanate from his work reduces the formal qualities of painting to a simplicity that is the unforgettable trade mark of this remarkable man.’