Terry Frost: New Work: A letter to the artist

Dear Terry,

Always, the phrase 'new work' creates excitement in the hearts of your friends: they know they are in for a surprise; they anticipate delight. By 'friends' I mean of course not only those who have the luck to spend time with you and Kath - and there are many of those, you are both irrepressible lovers of good company and absurdly generous with your own - but that broader company who admire your art and have a keen sense of the spirit - at once blithe and complex - behind it. They are those who have been your students, or who have read those extracts from your letters published in the Scolar book or in various catalogues, or heard you speak, perhaps, at this exhibition or that, with that strong midland intonation, always so direct and unpretentious, laughter not far from the surface. What they have registered always is your undisguised passion for art, and the clarity of an unassailable belief in its necessity to human existence.

As for the 'surprise', it hardly needs elaboration. It is simply amazing how you continuously ring the changes on that familiar repertoire of abstract motifs and signs and again and again find new configurations, subtly different dynamics of kinesis and stasis, balance and imbalance, float and tumble, swing and pause, spiral and counter-spiral. As I write I realise that 'ring the changes' (I was about to reject the phrase as a cliché) is perfectly apt: looking at these new paintings I am struck that their rhythmic music is like that of bell-ringing, as if they pictured movement and sound in shape and colour: the upward arc of the swing, the moment of poise at its apogee, the peel of descending notes, the reverberation of the single note, held, and repeated.

So often your work is described in its relation to the seen world - the landscape, the harbour with its rocking boats and buoys, sun and moon over water, trees, etc. - and of course it is visual reality that has held you in thrall. But often before anything else I think of the sounds and intervals of music, which means time and movement in the abstract. (I remember that your first fully characteristic work - painted in 1949 - was called Madrigal.) The arrangement of the individual split motifs in Halzephron, for example, might be seen as a kind of synaesthetic notation, as musical as it is visual. In Red, Black and White the red and black segments seem to descend like a chime on a vertical stave from a single red note, whilst at the left there sounds a sustained continuous note in red and at the right a black and red chord. Black and White Rhythm presents the struck discord of a percussionist's chimes (it looks like the instrument). Duende for Venice is a triad of blacks, a chord of dark sonorities. These responses are not merely fanciful, music here is a useful metaphor.

In a recent conversation about your marvellous Tate St Ives installation in homage to and celebration of the revolutionary Russian artists, you spoke emphatically of their principled love of 'structure'. You were describing the formal determinants of your 3'x3' paintings in red, black and white (or in various permutations of those three) that were to surround and abut that great 9'x9' central spiral. Malevich and Lissitskzy, you said, 'were absolutely committed to a shape'. Even when Malevich returned to a figurative style, you remarked, he subordinated what was observed in nature to the formalities of 'a good shape of colour.' Then you said something which seems close to the heart of your own creative endeavour: 'It was to do with thought, and, as with Matisse, with making things happen without copying anything, except an idea.' That was a brilliant link - so quickly made, so characteristically understated - of the French master with the Russians who had learnt so much from him. It states the connection in terms of what might be called an intellectuality of the eye, a specific exercise of intelligence that transcends abstraction and figuration alike and goes far beyond mere formalism. It was, in effect, a Terry Frost manifesto in miniature: that of an artist who had from the start been aware of mind as a creative agency. It is the mind 'makes things happen': the formal element in painting (as in music, as, indeed, in poetry) is not an end in itself, it is the means to creating reality.

I've written elsewhere, Terry, more formally, about the recent red, black and white paintings you made for the Tate St Ives exhibition, and of a long-standing awareness of Russian Suprematism and Constructivism as an informing element in your own approach to abstraction. I'm pleased to see One on Top and Small Red, Black and White as reminders of all that, though in these works, as in the larger Red, Black and White, described above, those emblematic colours have been released from the square format that was so important to the presentation at St Ives. And the painting included here from twenty five years ago, Circle of Love (1975/79), so like those cosmic paintings of Rodchenko, reminds us that he too featured among your Russian 'gods'.

I just found something Kandinsky (another hero of yours) wrote about the circle that reminds me of a crucial aspect of your own imagination, and which I thought you might appreciate: 'The circle is a synthesis of the most pronounced opposites. It combines the concentric and the excentric in one shape. Among the three principal shapes (triangle, rectangle, circle) it is the clearest indication to the fourth dimension.' You always speak of that other dimension, the fourth, with a totally unaffected conviction. The square, that most rigorous of rectangles, is represented here in Square Black, surprisingly framed by pure blue. And what a blue! It reminds me of something you once said: 'There's no such thing as blue, not until it's a blue something. And [in painting] that blue something has to be a totally new and discovered experience….'

You've always taught your students that colours don't just vary according to chromatic theory but in relation to our actual experience of seeing the world: 'You can do colour theory and you can close the book. Then you go out into nature and it's all there. Every colour is right, right for other colours, right for the form. It is after all what you have got to try to do in painting…' In painting this brings us back, of course, to those colour shapes you spoke of. For you abstraction has always been about the magical reduction of the colour forms of the given world to the analogy of the colour-sign, the graphic mark, the dynamic two-dimensional geometry of shapes on the plane. Your 'colour on granite, something hard, colour on grass, soft'; your '365 yellows', each different, collected on the coast from St Ives to Lands End; your infinite variety of blacks, 'as many blacks as there are yellows' (and that's more than one for every day of the year): these aspects of the phenomenal world, each nuance and individuation, are subjectively experienced not only through the senses but in thought and feeling, and in our movement in time.

'Abstraction taught me', you once wrote, 'to recognise the flat surface. How was I to paint the experience I was having…? I really did think there was a chance of making something happen in an analogous way on the flat surface, the flat surface being the vital important start.' Painting then becomes the means not to represent the marvellous appearance of the world - the world, someone said, is enough - but rather to convey something of our total experience of it. In painting the world is transformed by reverie and imagination, coloured by emotion, perceived through the prism of thought, its dynamism felt in our inner being. Nature is not art - 'One thing blue can never be in a painting and that's a blue sea.' - but nature can find expression through art.

And here again there is surprise at that magical translation. And delight. I don't underestimate the importance of that pleasure principle that seems to animate everything you make. Its not that you don't know about darkness, or that the tragic is outside your range: your work in homage to Lorca - Duende for Venice recalls the blacks that dominated those prints and paintings - was infused with a deep and beautiful melancholy. But when I look at these new paintings I am aware, as always, that all things summon their contraries to mind. Hello Blue, like many of your images, seems almost to state this in abstract terms: two half-discs that are signs for two hemispheres (shapes for forms) face each other across a divide, two blues that might be absolute opposites, one less dark, one more, and around them two other blues that speak of a infinity of blues, of the impossibility of conceiving blue as a single colour. In One on Top the living dynamic that each represents equally with the other spins in opposite directions, into and out of the cosmic centre of things. And what is to be said of the sheer joy of these other new paintings, that recapitulate and renew so brilliantly the visual themes of the work that began on that early morning walk along the quay over fifty years ago and continues to this day! I know, Terry, your friends will not be disappointed.

Best wishes and love

Mel Gooding
February 2003

(Copyright Mel Gooding)