Sir Terry Frost, R.A. 1915-2003

The present work was painted while Frost was based in Leeds, where from 1954-56 he held the position as Gregory Fellow of Painting and then in 1957 taught at Leeds College of Art.

Within a relatively short time of his arrival in Leeds, Frost realised that his work was reacting to the Yorkshire landscape in a very different way from that of Cornwall, and both the forms and the palette of these paintings show significant differences from the earlier works. His sense of being much more involved and dwarfed by a landscape began to become evident and the compositions take on a much more panoramic feel, and indeed frequently are physically much larger than the earlier St.Ives paintings. The intricate interlocking forms of St.Ives become much less central to the composition, being replaced by a distinct vertical emphasis, which may derive from the patterns of stone walls running along hillside fields. However, the strong black forms, which dominate the centre of the painting, have a pronounced sculptural feel. This may relate to the way in which the Gregory Fellows were able to absorb ideas from each other, and Frost’s contemporary during his Leeds period was Kenneth Armitage whose stylised figurative sculpture was highly critically regarded. Frost knew Armitage well from his time at Corsham where Armitage was head of the sculpture department, and this incorporation of what can be read as elements of figuration presages the figural references that would become more evident in his paintings from the later years of the decade.