Sir Terry Frost, R.A.

Acquired directly from the artist, and thence by descent to the present owner

The canvas is unlined. There is an area of craquelure in the upper right quadrant and another tiny area in the lower right quadrant. There is no sign of retouching under ultra-violet light. Three spots of adhesive appear to have been applied to the reverse of the canvas, although these do not correspond to areas of weakness in the canvas, or to areas of retouching. Held in a simple painted wooden frame.
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There's such a big scale up here and black and white mean so much and when I paint I try to get those sensations through a strong attack on the canvas (letter to Lawrence Gowing 27^th December 1956)

 

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. Fields probably dates to circa 1955, and thus has much in common with key works such as Red, Black & White, Leeds (Private Collection) of the same year. The intricate interlocking forms of the St Ives paintings have become much less central to the composition, being replaced by a pronounced vertical emphasis, which may derive from the patterns of stone walls running along hillside fields. The autumnal palette of the present work may allow us to relate it to the artist's own recollection of the winter of 1955-56 when he wrote:

Being in a vast cape of white and cold but brilliant space, the sharp air and smooth folds of white snow resting on fields, hanging on black lines... walking was good because I went down and the white came up all around and yet it never touched me, so I was a black thing in a funnel of white with no space that I knew. I could not touch the sides, the space and silence went with me as I walked, and I was so small. (Interview with David Lewis, July 1993, in David Lewis, Terry Frost, Scholar Press, Aldershot 1994, pp.73-76)