Sir Terry Frost, R.A.

David Gibbs & Co, London
Gifted to the present owner as a christening present, circa 1961

Original canvas. The surface is slightly dirty otherwise in excellent original condition with strong passages of impasto throughout. Under ultraviolet light there appear to be no signs of retouching. Held in a painted and gilt frame with canvas inset. Please note that the colours are slightly richer than the catalogue illustration suggests.
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The importance of his period of time in Leeds to Frost's art can hardly be understated. As we have seen in lot 117, 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 in his paintings, 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 made one of it's earliest appearances in Red, Black and White 1956 (Private Collection) and then develops further into an irregular polygonal form which performed a function of allowing the artist to suggest receding depth within his paintings. In the present work, Frost creates a window of glowing light apparently 'behind' the thin strips of bright colour. Close inspection reveals just how many colours Frost incorporated into the present painting, which, with a wonderfully manipulated paint surface and emphasised by the white form, give the central form a remarkable level of complexity.

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).