Text by John Hoyland

In these days of media-grabbing posers, with artists flatly denouncing the need for skill and artistic ability, under the umbrella of poor old Marcel Duchamp, what better time than now to remind the world that Art comes from the eye, the heart, the mind and the spirit. It’s about ideas pursued with passionate intensity in a joyful dialogue with the past – and a leap of high but calculated risk into an unknown future. It is about sensation, not sensationalism; the art manipulators are lost in the pursuit of fashion and attention seeking.

How many people does one remember, who automatically bring a smile to one’s face, even in brief recollection? Someone told me recently that Terry Frost reminded her of her father, who had also been a prisoner of war, and subsequently seemed to enjoy each experience with a vividness beyond the normal.

What a great joy it was occasionally to find Terry sitting in Mulligan’s Bar in Cork Street, red beret, green glasses perched on his nose, with a pint of Guinness which he would dilute with a bottle of champagne. He would be talking wide-eyed about the moonlight coming through the trees on a hillside in Provence. He would be talking of ellipses and eclipses, the sun, the moon and the stars – and about last night at the Chelsea Arts Club. He would also be telling everyone that I poisoned him with Thai fish soup, a smokescreen for his own mildly delinquent ways. The sheer excitement, the rage, the joy and the honesty, and also the deadly seriousness – all things one experienced with Terry… and that was only after the first bottle…

Terry delighted in life. His sense of fun and wonder belied the subtlety of his mind and eye, the poetry and love captured in his distinctive vocabulary of universal signs where space, time, construction and colour capture what he had experienced through nature, and more importantly in reverie. His perceptions flowed from him, like an ever-running river.

Terry’s paintings are a kind of dream language, and like music, they propose a new reality. When Terry condensed the image he had created, simplicity gave his work great power. His techniques of painting and collage were simple, almost primitive – but no painting of reality can move one like the revelation of its underlying structure. His paintings weave a dream language, a landscape and therefore have a metaphoric power. They float high above the pitfalls of reality. Terry embraced the informal and the irrational, together with the spontaneous and the unknown. As a painter, he was able to let go: to jump into the dark.

Terry’s paintings are a seduction. One develops a relationship with these inanimate objects which becomes a bond with the living person, a mirror, a realm of illusive power. He developed an inner eye. He understood the ecstasy of colour as light, and as a bridge to the metaphysical. Terry was a model of how to live in order to make art, his own heroes never far from his mind. Towards the end there was a great liberation of knowledge, of risk and of spontaneity. His works play a game of structural truthfulness: they are alive. Terry strove to make every song sing. Terry pushed way beyond the fixing of appearances. As Jung said, his “art, like life, called not for perfection but for completeness”.

There is no irony in Terry’s work; there may be humour and wit, but there is no place for cynicism. Only joy, passion and wonderment, clarity and eagerness. It is painting made to look easy: painting as the embodiment of what it is to be human.

I would have liked to have met Mir ó and Matisse, but I was happy to settle for the company of Terry Frost.

John Hoyland

6.7.2004

'Life is just a bowl of cherries' by Martin Krajewski

The 6.03pm Paddington to Penzance slowly pulled out of the station as John and I raised our glasses to Terry and immediately ordered large 'second helpings' of Gin and Tonic. As I relaxed back into my seat in the dining car, I thought of the many times Terry had made this, his ‘favorite trip' back home to Cornwall himself.

John Hoyland and I had already made the journey several times that summer, but this was to be the last time we would see Terry as his long battle with illness was almost at an end. However, despite Terry's rapidly failing health he was smiling as usual when we arrived. Sure enough we had the most marvelous day, but then you always did with Terry.

In the studio, Terry was still working with all the enthusiasm and daring of old, whilst complaining about the price of paint as he always did. There was an amazing freshness and vitality about the work yet he was still taking great chances being determined to sign off with a couple of 'absolute snorters' or 'real belters' as he liked to call them.

I first met Terry at John's studio in 1999 –the trademark red beret and glasses curiously balanced on only one ear. He was on the very best of form, talking enthusiastically of blue blacks and red blacks, of pushing yellows and greens this way or that, of sunrises over the Lizard and blue moons in Newlyn bay and how 'painting changed people lives.' It changed mine and I certainly hadn't expected that.

Terry's retrospective at The RA in 2000 was a great success and was followed by the first showing at Tate St Ives of his installation: 'Contrasts in Red, Black and White.’ I was deeply honoured when Terry asked me to 'look after' the work for him and it has since been shown at Tate Britain and was given a special position at The RA Summer Exhibition earlier this year.

–Life had certainly not always been a bowl of cherries for Terry, but he remarkably overcame all of the obstacles and hardships of his early years and the shortages after the Second World War to follow his chosen path, but not without Kath. She was always there, a tower of strength and support and without whom the great adventure would never have been possible. Throughout his life Terry followed his dream and his dream was painting. When once asked about his work, he simply replied, 'What I do is what I do'

Martin Krajewski

2004