Terry Frost
(28/11/2004)

'I am convinced that people who just look for words to describe art completely miss what is in a good work, for words describe the known image; good art is indescribable and that is why it's usually an irritant. Because it is really indescribable it retains a freedom for the artist. I like the idea or reverie, image and imagination, but reverie and imagination are the true art, indestructible, because whatever your medium it is not the image. The medium destroys the image and only courage and conviction can search out a new object which is an object that can set off an image. If you have any imagination the circle is completed always and forever, without words, and so there is no change, only objects of the struggle of each artist in each decade.'

Terry Frost was born in 1915 in Leamington Spa. He first began painting after he was captured as a commando during the Second World War and became a POW in Bavaria.

'I used to do paintings for fags and extra rations - that gave me a lot of practise... In POW camp I got a tremendous spiritual experience, a more aware or heightened perception during starvation, and I honestly do not think that that awakening has ever left me.'

After the war, and acting on the advice of his friend Adrian Heath, he went to St. Ives to make a serious attempt at art. From 1947 to 1950 he attended Camberwell School of Art, London. His first one-man exhibition was at the Leicester Galleries, London in 1952. He had by now found his own abstract style.

'The shapes of my first abstract paintings were accurate in relation to other shapes, but I found that if you turned an angle or an axis slightly off the vertical it immediately set up a tension and a rhythm with the other shapes& &and you realise that you've set up a new series of tensions and possibilities, and so the compositions would begin to grow.'

He taught at the Bath Academy of Art, Corsham Court from 1952, was the Gregory Fellow at Leeds University 1954 to 1956, and taught at Leeds School of Art from 1956 to 1957. Working with Barbara Hepworth, absorbing Russian Avant Garde, Matisse and Rubens, by the late 1950's Terry Frost was an established artist, regularly showing in London and the major group exhibitions. In 1960 he held his first one-man show in New York.
He became Artist in Residence at Newcastle University Fine Art Department f in 1964. In 1965 he became a full time lecturer at Reading University's Department of Fine Art. From 1977 to 1981 he was Professor of Painting at the University of Reading. In 1992 he was elected Royal Academician, receiving a knighthood in 1998.

As well as painting Terry has made constructions in wood and cardboard, and applied motifs from his paintings to ceramics, watchstraps, silk scarves, ties, and even T-shirts. In the 1970s he designed silver jewellery with black and white motifs that were made by jeweller Michael Manzi of Penzance. In 1997 British Airways applied his 1968 painting Colour Down the Side to the tail of one of their aeroplanes as part of their 'flying gallery'. In his own opinion this painting was 'one of the best I have ever done, a real humdinger.'
Terry Frost died on 1st September 2003.