Sir Terry Frost, R.A.

London, Leicester Galleries, 1956 (possibly, catalogue untraced).

The board is in good overall condition. There is a very small abrasion along the right edge in the upper right quadrant. There are scattered tiny abrasions along the left edge in the upper left quadrant, but these may have been the marks of the artist. There is no sign of retouching under ultra-violet light. Held behind glass in the original simple painted wooden frame and protected on the reverse with a sheet of perspex.
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Trained at Camberwell School of Art, Frost's earliest mature work tracks a path to abstraction which is quite distinct in its style and influences. Although he was working in St Ives in the early 1950s, Frost's painting did not fully embrace the gestural abstraction of Cornish contemporaries such as Lanyon, tending to keep a strong element of carefully balanced and calculated spatial elements at the fore. Thus his St Ives paintings from the early 1950s sit at the very centre of the debate between the experience-influenced abstracted images of the St Ives painters and the rigorously constructivist work of the artists of the Fitzroy group and therefore have a crucial place in British abstract art of the immediate post-war period.

The group of works to which Long Green and Blue Painting belongs mostly date from 1951-53 although the genesis is generally considered to be the important 1950 painting Walk Along the Quay (Private Collection). In this work and others of the group, Frost sought to find a visual language which would express the sense of place and movement found in the harbour of St Ives in an abstract idiom. Derived in part from his experience of early morning walks through the town, the paintings use extremely sophisticated geometrical relationships to suggest familiar forms and shapes whilst never actually offering us pictorially identifiable references. These paintings also see the earliest appearances of what was to become the standard vocabulary of Frost's art; the semi-circles, the highlighted discs and the truncated L and T forms.

Although many of the paintings of this group have a dense, worked surface, some, perhaps most notably Green, Black & White Movement (Tate Collection) of 1951, have a thinner almost opaque quality. Frost claimed that this effect in the Tate painting was the result of his trying to correct some problems in the early stages of execution by scrubbing it in the bath, but whatever the source, the areas of thinly brushed greens function well against the more solid framework of darker colours and allow the white forms to float effortlessly, enhancing their usual identification with the forms of boats at anchor. Patrick Heron praised exactly this quality in Frost's painting, specifically praising Green, Black & White Movement for the creation of a picture plane that hinted at the limpidity of the shallow harbour waters. One may however suggest that Frost was also responding to the work of St Ives contemporaries such as Peter Lanyon, and certainly the strong green, blue, black and white palette is one that is unusual for Frost at this time.

Long Green and Blue Painting is a work which combines theoretical concerns, such as the use of geometric partition of the picture plane and the clear influence of the writing of D'Arcy Thompson, with the more romantic suggestion of boats at anchor, the encroaching tide and the forms and movement of the harbour-side to create an image of great power and impact which over fifty years after its execution still looks fresh and exciting.