Sir Terry Frost, R.A.

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner in the late 1950s 

Newcastle Upon Tyne, Laing Art Gallery, Terry Frost: Retrospective,1964, no.17, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue, and toured by the Arts Council to York, Kingston upon Hull and Bradford.

The canvas is unlined. It is somewhat loose on its stretcher and undulates slightly, particularly in the lower left quadrant. As such the work may well benefit from a professional re-stretch. There is one small loss to the paint surface (0.5cm. diameter) in a grey area centre right, and another loss (2 by 1cm.) in the upper left quadrant to the right of the innermost red stripe. Two tiny 1cm scratches are seen towards the right end of the lower edge and two short hairline cracks near the lower left corner. Otherwise the richly impastoed surface appears to be in beautiful original condition. However, having been in the same private collection almost since the date it was painted, the work has accumulated a quantity of surface dirt and the work would benefit greatly from a thorough professional clean. Under UV light, certain passages of the white pigment appear to flouresce - this is fairly typical of Frost's work of this period, and is highly unlikely to be the result of any later retouching. Presented unglazed in the original grey painted wooden frame. Though structurally sound, the frame has various chips and scratches and the work may benefit from re-presentation. Please note that the reds are less pink in tone and less garish than they appear in the catalogue illustration.
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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.

The present painting bears marked similarities to the large Red, Black and White, Leeds 1955 (Private Collection) although here the areas of geometric forms that run across the image are more centrally placed in a way that Frost would re-use in later Leeds paintings, such as Blue Winter (British Council Collection).