Sir Terry Frost, R.A. 1915-2003

Cambridge, Arts Council Gallery, The Gregory Fellows, 8^th – 29^th February 1964, no.25 (and toured by the Arts Council to Bolton, Liverpool, Nottingham, Southampton and Cardiff) (wherein erroneously listed as oil on canvas).

David Lewis et al., Terry Frost, Scholar Press, Aldershot, 1994, p.87 illustrated in colour, p.87 (wherein erroneously titled as 'Drowning Blue').

The increasing simplification and openness of Frost’s work in the late 1950s is perhaps a mark of the growing confidence that he had developed. With a widening international reputation and a contract with Waddington Galleries, he was developing an open and expansive manner that brought both acclaim and sales.

The simplification of the imagery of Frost’s painting in this period can perhaps be related to a similar shift in the work of his close friend Roger Hilton. While Frost was in Leeds, the two had carried on a long correspondence debating the paths that their art could and should take, and with Frost’s return to St.Ives in 1957 and Hilton’s increasingly frequent and lengthy stays from 1958 onwards, it was perhaps inevitable that correspondences should appear in their work. Both artists began to introduce references to the figure into their painting in 1958 and 1959, although Hilton’s were increasingly overt. Frost however found, as he had in his work earlier in the decade, that he could devise a manner that both suggested figuration whilst still remaining ostensibly abstract, and in the paintings of 1959 and 1960, the reduction of the palette made the paintings a powerful vehicle for Frost’s undoubted compositional skills.

Night Blue draws the viewer into its heart, the vigour of the expansive brushstrokes belying the delicate network of forms that dance under the surface, each a stage on the path to the final image. Although originally exhibited under the title Night Blue, which we have retained, in David Lewis’ monograph the painting is titled Drowning Blue, and this sense of forms seen through an almost translucent surface, heightened of course by the palette, does indeed make sense. In this, one might draw comparison with Hilton’s magisterial Aral Sea (Private Collection) of 1958, which uses a central form not dissimilar to that in Night Blue. Chris Stephens interprets Hilton’s form in Aral Sea as having evident female qualities (Chris Stephens, Roger Hillton, Tate Publishing, London, 2006, p.44), and if this were so, and in the light of the move by both artists towards figurative references noted above, might thus link the present painting with works such as Blue and White Figure 1959 (Private Collection) and Terre Verte and White Figure 1959 (Coll. Wakefield Museums and Galleries) where Frost produces images that can be read as both fully abstract but also as schematised female figures.