Getting to know Terry

There is something about the work of Terry Frost which inspires first name terms almost immediately. It has an easy informality, a quality which buttonholes the viewer, commanding the attention and keeping you amused, until it’s time to turn to the next picture. Even if you never met the man, it seems quite natural to start calling him Terry, at least in your mind. It is perhaps the relaxed familiarity of the work - a result no doubt of his ability to tap so effectively into archetypal forms such as the circle and the crescent - which leads you into it, and nurtures from the start a relationship of intimacy. I was fortunate to know Terry a little, during the last dozen or so years of his life, and I give here an account of our first meeting and quote from our interview then and subsequent conversations.

To be with Terry was a pleasure, partly because of his wicked humour. The fund of stories was inexhaustible, and he told them not only with panache but also with visible and audible enjoyment. Even at the end of his life, when illness cast a shadow over his days, he carried on telling anecdotes and recounting his memories. I was very grateful for this narrative gift, as I was researching my monograph on Roger Hilton at the time, and Hilton and Frost had been great friends and sparring partners. But Frost’s gift as a raconteur was not simply an amusing aspect to his personality, it was fundamental to the man and his art. Obviously he did not tell stories through his art, remaining resolutely an abstract painter, though drawing closely upon the natural world for inspiration. No, his storytelling was a verbal art and the counterpart to his ingrained belief that life should be enjoyed, and that included art too. Although he was intensely and privately serious about his painting, the public face was for the most part joyful and entertaining. Of course there were balancing moments of tragedy and sorrow (as there are in the poetry of his beloved Lorca) but, as a rule, the art which left Frost’s studio was celebratory. Its role was not to instruct but to give pleasure.

Famously, Terry took as his motto the adage, ‘Life is just a bowl of cherries’, and liked to wear a T-shirt with this emblazoned on it. There were ups and downs in his career, and periods in the wilderness, but his instinct for optimism was unquenchable. I remember when I first interviewed him in 1990, down in Newlyn on a glorious summer’s day. He was full of jokes and laughter, energetic and resilient. He sketched out his whole life-story for me in a couple of hours, from his early interest in art at school, through the war and POW camp, to studentship at Camberwell, the discovery of abstraction and the steady artistic trajectory since.

His early life in Leamington Spa had been hard, but art kept edging in. As he recalled: ‘From a very early age I used to carry coal for people, clean drains out, do a newspaper round in the mornings and another in the evenings. Then at 14 I went to work, but I wasn’t cut out for engineering [all his uncles worked in car and tool manufacturing]. So I ended up working in Curry’s, the cycling specialists. I was only the errand boy, but they used to get me to dress the windows. At Easter time, for instance, I’d use yellow and green cr ê pe paper, and although I wasn’t taught, I soon learnt to tube it and do all kinds of things with it. Looking back, I can see that I was already quite involved with colour, decoration and presentation.

‘Then I moved to a bakery. That was quite a decorative job. You try putting the cream and jam in doughnuts! Or I’d have to put 2,000 crosses on hot cross buns. Then I got a job with Armstrong Whitworth, the aircraft people who made bombers. I worked with the chap who did the targets on the wings.’ It would be difficult to find a clearer foretaste of his predilection for circles.

When war came, he enlisted in the army and soon transferred to the commandos. Terry always said that prison camp, when he was captured in Crete in 1941 and interned in Stalag 383 in Bavaria, was the best education he could have had. It was there that he met the painter Adrian Heath who saw the portraits he was knocking out for the other soldiers. Frost’s souvenir portraits were inspired by a professional tramp called Reg Challis, also a prisoner, who was a dab hand at caricature. He encouraged Terry to draw and he quickly developed an ability to capture a likeness. Then Heath encouraged him to paint in the camp’s art class, and gave him constructive criticism. Later, in civilian life, it was Heath who arranged for Frost to study at Camberwell School of Art.

Terry continued the story: ‘After the war I had to go back to my old job but I’d made my mind up I was going to paint. I wouldn’t have had that kind of courage if I hadn’t starved a few times.’ He went to St Ives with his wife Kath (they married in 1945) and lived in a caravan for a while, painting, with a bit of tuition from Leonard Fuller at his art school in St Ives. In 1947 he went to Camberwell, and by 1949 he was doing his first abstracts. He didn’t like what he called ‘the Camberwell hike’, the system of measuring appearances, ‘with my head in a chinstrap, the chair marked in position and my feet marked and my easel marked’. That kind of Euston Road realism was not for Frost, who was encouraged instead by Victor Pasmore, himself busy converting from a very successful Whistlerian realism to full-blooded abstraction.

Although Terry had made the crucial break-through to abstraction, he still had to make a living as an artist, particularly as he had a growing family to support. He went back to live in Cornwall, which he’d grown to like, partly because the art scene was so vital there. (Of particular interest was the presence of Ben Nicholson and the local boy Peter Lanyon. From the mid-1950s Roger Hilton visited regularly, but didn’t settle in Cornwall until 1965.) Terry had to take various odd jobs, and even went back to art school at Penzance on a 12-month grant. He commented wryly: ‘ Penzance was desperation on my part. I’d taken a big studio in St Ives and was surviving by painting portraits for 30 bob, and views of the harbour.’ Then his friend the sculptor Denis Mitchell got him a job as a part-time assistant to Barbara Hepworth. This was to prove an important episode.

‘I learnt quite a lot from it’, recalled Terry. ‘She was a brilliant teacher. Denis, who was Barbara’s full-time assistant, was very patient with me. Lifting heavy stone is a very slow job, and he taught me to take time. Barbara would know if you weren’t carving correctly by the sound, and she’d be out like a shot. She’d just run her hand over the sculpture and she’d pick up a claw and go across about a foot of stone. She could turn that stone in about three directions, yet she would relate to it whatever else was going on, and she never lost her high point. So from one claw cut, you were left with four months’ work with all that stone to take off. She knew exactly what she was doing. It was very good because you got to appreciate form.

‘It affected my painting tremendously because I could only think that my painting was a total illusion because these shapes were fact. Sculpture is a fact. I finished up not being able to paint and moving very strongly into collage, and also into mobiles and back into sculpture, though I still found I couldn’t be happy getting round a piece of sculpture. I couldn’t think my way round it. So I concentrated on collage, which shook off the last traces of the Euston Road teaching because it made a positive shape with positive colour. That was the way I got back into painting.’

He continued: ‘I have no regrets about the strict Camberwell training. Abstract art cleared me to be able to see for myself rather than seeing through other painters’ ideas. What worries me about all the people who are supposed to be doing figuration now is that they seem to miss out on so many lovely things. Most of our figurative painters are European in origin and bring that angst lark with them which I can’t stand. I’m more interested in decoration. I think decoration is more important than bloody angst.’ For many years, pure-bred Modernists despised the decorative (the architect Adolf Loos said that ornament was crime), but that puritan high-mindedness has now thankfully been relaxed, and ‘decorative’ is no longer a term of abuse. But Frost was from the beginning very certain in his understanding and use of the decorative, and had the philosophy to back it up. It is a mainstay of his art.

In 1951, Terry met Roger Hilton and they became firm friends. They talked endlessly about art, visited Paris together and got into a variety of scrapes, mostly through Hilton’s unparalleled rudeness. As Terry remembered: ‘As I got to know him better - by about 1954 - we talked more and more about the flat surface. I don’t know why we got onto that, but we recognized that it was a flat surface we were working on, and to make things work on that you’ve got to re-state them as a flat surface. It doesn’t go in anywhere, and it doesn’t come out anywhere. The spectator makes that happen - if they’re any good. Most spectators are too lazy to respond and that’s why they don’t like modern art because it means making an effort.’ Hilton and Frost kept in touch though they were often in different parts of the country, Frost in Leeds (1954-8) and then Banbury (1963-74), and Hilton mostly oscillating between London and Cornwall. They wrote letters to each other, which make fascinating reading. Undoubtedly they influenced each other, and I think Frost gained a great deal from the association. Hilton was a rigorous and original thinker and a daring and inventive artist, and Terry recognized this, describing him at the end of his life as ‘the best painter I’ve ever met’.

There are certain forms which recur in Terry’s work with the regularity of a mantra. Particularly evident are chevrons, hanging half-circles or half-ovals and the circle itself. He enjoyed celebrating the world around him, but his responses to it were usually filtered through a lengthy process of absorbing, forgetting and then renewing through approximate geometry. Thus the experiences of travelling to Cyprus in the 1970s and ‘80s resurfaced in powerful paintings of the sun and black olives, though not painted in any acceptably realistic way. As he said: ‘A circle means so much to me; it’s become like a god. I can use it in any colour I want, and often I use it in black, because I think a black sun is beautiful.’ Abstraction gave him the freedom to invent and he took full advantage of it: for instance, in the untitled mixed media work here of red and black spinning suns with a busy squeezebox passage of red, black and white between them, while the addition of various arrows speeds up the whole mood.

Look at one of the earliest paintings in this show, Stern (1957), a radically simplified design giving merely the section of a boat, the colours played right down. It’s about shapes more than description, as indeed is Kathleen, Battersea (1948-9), a vibrant domestic study in pastel. Although based on direct observation, this is far from Euston Road realism. It’s composed of blocks of colour in a kind of vortex, more about movement and shapes playing off against one another than it is about a specific subject. For pure observational work we must go back even earlier to the war years, to the historic watercolour Study of Stalag 383 (1943), depicting a guard post on stilts against the prison camp perimeter wire.

Terry’s colourful mobiles and constructions bear out the effectiveness of the lessons he learnt from Barbara Hepworth, but also the limitations of his three-dimensional practice of which he himself was fully aware. Thus the constructions tend to be essentially planar, composed of discs or other flat shapes, arranged in dynamic contiguity. He was far more at ease with collage, and consequently more inventive. Many of his most successful paintings incorporate collaged elements, quite often cut-out shapes of painted canvas. June Collage (2002) is a particularly happy piece, all stripes and half-ovals, or Oasis Tree (2000), with the stacked coloured saucers of the water table below a sunburst of red, black and blue spiky palm leaves.

In 2 for Black + White (1992), Terry approaches the blatant sexual suggestiveness often found in Hilton’s work, and it’s revealing that the particular medium he used here was the combination of oil and charcoal, much favoured by Hilton himself. On occasion, Terry can be surprisingly subtle. Look at the unpromisingly titled Sunblast, Pink + White (1999). It’s really a white painting inflected with the palest pinks and blues. Or Blue Spiral (2003): what might at first seem to be simply an Yves Klein Blue canvas in fact contains a favourite spiral form. And of course, this being Terry, humour keeps breaking in. Straight Laced (2002) is a case in point, or the cheeky salute to Ben Nicholson in P isa (1987). But whatever he turns his hand to, the signature of Terry Frost is unmissable and unmistakeable: here, in a series of glorious affirmations, is an extended hymn to the irrepressibility of the human spirit.

© Andrew Lambirth

April 2008

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

1915 Born 13 October Leamington Spa, Warwickshire

1930 After attending local schools, begins work, first in a cycle shop, then at a radio factory, bakery, aircraft factory and electrical component wholesaler in Birmingham

1939-41 Called up as a member of the Army Reserve and serves in Palestine and France

1941-45 Transfers to the Commandos, serves in the Middle East and is taken prisoner in Crete. POW until April 1945, during which time he meets Adrian Heath who gives him drawing lessons and encourages him to paint. His first solo exhibition is held in his home town, but in his absence

1945 After his release, marries Kathleen Clarke in August, and returns to wholesaling work in Birmingham, while attending art classes in the evening

1946 Following an illness, resigns his job and moves to Cornwall at Heath’s suggestion, to study at Leonard Fuller’s St Ives School of Painting. Becomes friends with Peter Lanyon, Sven Berlin and also Leonard Richmond, who teaches him to paint landscapes in oil ‘that might sell’

1947 Meets Ben Nicholson, with whom he corresponds. In the autumn starts his studies at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, taught by Coldstream, Pasmore and Kenneth Martin, inter al.

1948 Introduces Pasmore to Ben Nicholson. Returns each summer to St Ives to work at the Sunset Bar, and to paint and exhibit with the St Ives Society of Artists. Begins to experiment with abstraction

1949 Awarded NDD and continues to study pottery and lithography unofficially at Camberwell

1950 Returns to live in St Ives, taking a studio next to Ben Nicholson’s and working part-time for, and occasionally exhibiting with Lanyon at, Robin Nances’s the furniture-maker

1951 Starts to work as an assistant to Barbara Hepworth (together with John Wells and Denis Mitchell) while studying for his ‘Intermediate’ at Penzance School of Art. Meets Roger Hilton. Elected a member of the Penwith Society. E.C. (Peter) Gregory buys his important oil painting, ‘Walk along the quay’ (now Coll. Adrian Heath, on loan to Sheffield City Art Galleries). Meets Sam Francis for the first time, then exhibiting at the ICA in London

1952 Begins to teach life drawing at Bath Academy of Art at Corsham, while also teaching anatomy and still-life drawing part-time at Willesden School of Art, London. Stays with Adrian Heath in London during term-time

E.C. Gregory purchases the artist’s ‘Blue movement’ 1952 for the CAS (illustrated in its Annual Report for 1952-53), and the British Council makes its first purchase (a watercolour) from the artist

E.C. Gregory offers Frost the two-year Fellowship in Painting which he was funding at Leeds University. Returns to St Ives for the summers while at Leeds

Teaches part-time on Harry Thubron’s Basic Design Course at Leeds School of Art. First visit to Paris, accompanied by Roger Hilton, who also takes him to visit Sam Francis and Soulages in their studios, and to Noguchi’s sculpture garden for UNESCO.

Returns to live and paint full-time in St Ives. Shortly thereafter becomes acquainted with the American critic Clement Greenberg, and later with the dealer Martha Jackson and with Rothko, who all visit St Ives towards the end of the decade

The Tate Gallery purchases its first painting by the artist, from E.C. Gregory’s collection. (It has since purchased more paintings, notably in the 1970s

First visit to the USA including three weeks in New York and visits to several artists’ studios

Moves to Banbury and begins part-time teaching at Coventry School of Art

Visiting Lecturer in Fine Art at Reading University. Summer teaching at San Jos é, California, and that autumn takes up a Fellowship in Painting at Newcastle University

Appointed Lecturer in Fine Art at Reading University. Awarded a Non-purchase Prize at the 5 th John Moores exhibition, Liverpool

1967 Teaches at Voss Summer School, Norway

1969 Awarded a Prize at the Arts Council of NI Open Painting exhibition, Belfast

1970 Promoted to Reader in Fine Art at Reading University

Member of the Selection Jury for the First British International Drawing Biennale, organised by Teesside BC at Middleborough

Moves to live and work in Newlyn, Cornwall

Summer teaching at Banff, Canada

Summer teaching at the University of Western Ontario, Canada

Appointed Professor of Painting at Reading University. Teaches at the Summer School, Nicosia, Cyprus

Teaches at the Summer Academy, Umea, Sweden

1981 Retires from Reading University, and made Professor Emeritus. Visits Russia for the first time to see the early work of Kandinsky and Matisse

1992 Elected a Royal Academician

1998 Knighted

2003 Dies September 1