Terry Frost 1915-2003
Blue Painting, 1958
oil on canvas
62 x 35 ins




This exuberant abstract, painted just after Terry Frost had completed three years as the Gregory Fellow at Leeds University, dates from a particularly significant moment in the artist’s career. While at Leeds Frost had come into contact with many of the leading figures in British avant-garde art - among them Victor Pasmore and Roger Hilton (with whom he began regular correspondence) and his work now began to take on a new maturity and confidence that placed him among the leading British abstract painters of his generation. The impact of the vast expanses of the Yorkshire landscape on his work was also noticeable; the gentler, rocking rhythms of light and colour his work had showed while he was developing his abstract style in St. Ives in the early 50s, giving way to taller, simpler works with a much greater emphasis on dark, vertical lines, often with contrasts and white. Much of that is still evident here though, with its pronounced harmonies of blue and blue-greens and altogether gentler atmosphere, there is the feeling that Frost, now back painting in St. Ives full-time and free, briefly, of teaching commitment (because of a recent contract with the Waddington Galleries) was looking to draw the two strands of his recent visual experiences together. Yet however landscape-influenced his work may be in its origins, it is still important to remember that, as Terry Frost himself has observed 'When I make a painting it is with paint on a flat surface and belongs to itself. It has nothing to do with imitation or representation, though my idea maybe and usually is started by an experience of nature or rather the experience of one human being wandering, observing, questioning, worrying, trying to see the truth, trying to penetrate the mystery of life.'