Sir Terry Frost- a brief Biography

Sir Terry Frost was born in Leamington Spa in 1915 and spent his early years in Coventry before fighting in France, Palestine, Crete and the Middle East in World War Two. Terry Frost first began to paint during the four years 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. After the war Terry Frost lived in a caravan while studying at the St Ives School of Painting in Cornwall. Terry Frost then attended Camberwell School of Art on an ex-serviceman’s grant from 1947 to 1950 where, under the guidance of Victor Pasmore and St Ives artists such as Ben Nicholson and Peter Lanyon, Terry Frost moved into abstraction after beginning in the Euston Road Group realist tradition. Terry Frost returned to St Ives upon leaving Camberwell, where he worked as Barbara Hepworth's assistant on Contrapuntal Forms (1951) for the Festival of Britain

Terry 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. In 1956 he moved to Yorkshire as the Gregory Fellow at Leeds University, where works such as Blue Winter (1956) were inspired by Frost's professed desire to create an ‘abstract image-equivalence’ for his experiences that was inspired by the Tate gallery’s show of American Abstract Expressionists. Although Terry Frost's work rejected specific images, he slowly built up a vocabulary of signs- chevrons, discs, crescents, arrowheads, lozenges, triangles, spirals, horizontal shafts- that is best typified in works such as M17 from 1962.

Terry Frost's first one man exhibition was held at the Leicester Galleries in London in 1952 and at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York in 1960. Terry Frost was made a member of the Penwith Society in St Ives, where he lived from 1959–63, and was Artist in Residence at the Fine Art Department of Newcastle University in 1964. In 1965 Terry Frost took up a position as a full time lecturer at the Department of Fine Art of Reading University and was Professor of Painting there from 1977 to 1981.

Sir Terry 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. Terry Frost 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.

A retrospective exhibition of Terry Frost's work took place at the Mayor Gallery, London in 1990 and a major retrospective, 'Terry Frost: Six Decades', was held at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2000. Sir Terry Frost was elected a Royal Academician in 1992 and received a knighthood in 1998. His last show was at Tate St Ives, for which he painted a large mural. Sir Terry Frost lived and worked in Cornwall until his death in 2003. In a tribute to the painter written before he died, the owners of Badcock's Gallery in Newlyn, where Frost lived, noted that ‘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’.

Sir Terry Frost's works can be bought from the Modern Art Dealer, Caroline Wiseman. Please visit her web site www.carolinewiseman.com to view more works for sale