. . . a love of landscape

Terry Frost was born in Leamington Spa in 1915. He came to art late, first painting and drawing as a POW during WW2. After the war it was his friend Adrian Heath who encouraged him to go to St Ives and make a serious attempt at art, and who helped him to get a place to study at Camberwell School of Art in London. Terry then divided his time between London and Cornwall, and rapidly became an integral part of both artistic communities.

His first one-man show was at the Leicester Galleries in London in 1952, by which time he was committed to abstraction. He had moved away from Coldstream's dogma at Camberwell, and the softer pictorialism of seaside painting in favour of developing newer forms - a language that he felt he could use to express himself most naturally - quickly absorbing the lessons of Peter Lanyon, Barbara Hepworth, Heath's interest in the Russian avant-garde, and Matisse whose work he would have seen in London. By the late 50s, Terry was showing regularly in London, and in 1960 exhibited for the first time in New York.

This forthcoming exhibition of Terry Frost's new paintings, runs concurrently with a retrospective at the Royal Academy.

His work has always been - as the artist is himself - completely natural and alive. The paintings radiate energy. They are self-confident, self-assured, and exuberant - out going and outreaching. The paintings are about spontaneity and immediacy where the rhythms, forms and colours radiate the artist's warmth. There is a joie de vivre and freedom that is irresistible.

Terry's work has throughout his career been dominated by a love of landscape and of painting itself, and the later work more specifically by the warm sun of Lorca's Mediterranean filling the pictures with light and colour.