Sir Terry Frost, R.A. 1915-2003

The importance of his period of time in Leeds to Frost’s art can hardly be understated. As we have seen in the previous lot, the influence of the landscape introduced a broader and more gestural manner to his painting, and new devices begin to appear, allowing the artist to expand the structural possibilities available to him.

In 1956, a pentagonal form begins to appear, derived from an experience evocatively described by the artist:

I drove through the snow and had lunch with Herbert Read…After lunch we went for a walk…I looked up and I saw the white sun spinning on top of a copse…now I recall that I thought I saw a Naples yellow blinding circle spinning on top of black verticals. The sensation was true. I was spellbound and, of course, when I tried to look again ‘it’ had gone, just a sun and a copse on the brow of a hill covered in snow… (The Artist, circa 1975)

The pentagonal spinning form, seen in Red, Black and White 1956 (Private Collection), develops further into an irregular polygonal form which performed a function of allowing the artist to suggest receding depth within his paintings, and in the present work, the bright yellow becomes a distant space glimpsed through a curtain of liquid colours of more sombre hue.

This new element was particularly praised by Patrick Heron, who wrote in 1957:

In Frost’s new work an overtly geometric (and somehow symbolic) form lies involved in the downward-moving rain of pigment gestures…a broad compositional structural statement lying behind the bead-curtain of dribbles, that gives the picture that power and punch, that three-dimensional focus and concentration of space that no purely Tachist picture ever exhibits. (Patrick Heron, ‘London’, Arts, vol.32 no.1, October 1957 p.17)