Terry Frost. The Radiant Moment

About

Coming late to the painting life (as a prisoner of war he learnt the basics and hit upon his metier), he had to make up for lost time and applied himself with all the seriousness of the mature student. He learnt through friends and colleagues: first from Adrian Heath, his mentor in prison camp, then from the teachers at Camberwell School of Art (1947-49), and particularly Victor Pasmore, but also from the artists of St Ives where he chose to settle after the war. Ben Nicholson was an inspiration, and so was Peter Lanyon, while Frost’s stint as an assistant to Barbara Hepworth (1951-2) taught him about form the hard way, especially when he had to carve ten tons of Connemara blue marble. He absorbed Cubism through Nicholson and Heath, and discovered landscape with Lanyon. Later he became allies with Roger Hilton, one of the most uncompromising figures in post-war abstraction.

Frost painted his first abstract in the early 1950s before going to Leeds University in 1954 on a two-year Fellowship. These severe early pictures are rigorously non-illusionistic, composed of flat shapes and colour, with no visible perspective. The thrust of the image depends on proportion and relationship. Frost’s heroes were Kupka and Malevich, El Lissitzky, Kandinsky, Tatlin and Rodchenko. For instance, seeing Lissitzky’s design CCCP!  was an epiphany for Frost. In this he seems to have something in common with James Joyce, who adapted the Christian epiphany (or manifestation of Christ to the Magi – usually celebrated on 6th January, our Twelfth Night) to describe the sudden ‘revelation of the whatness of a thing’. Joycean epiphanies evoke that moment when ‘the soul of the commonest object seems to us radiant’. And this is what Frost did – paint the radiant moment.

Frost was first and foremost a romantic, by disposition and intent. Genial and gregarious, he was also subject to fits of melancholy and depression, the other side of his optimistic high spirits. Too often we think of Frost simply as the artist of joy, of ‘Life is just a bowl of cherries’, his oft-repeated and somewhat misleading mantra. Actually, Frost knew the dark side just as well as the light, which is why his work still has relevance and potency. As Adrian Heath pointed out, for Frost emotion was more important than reason, and he found that direct and spontaneous action produced more authentic results than calculation and planning. But he always needed a structure of formal discipline to present and contain his intuitions, and he first learnt the glimmerings of this at Camberwell, under the tuition of Victor Pasmore. It was Pasmore’s use of collage, for instance, that set Frost on the path of sticking cut-out canvas shapes to his paintings – one of his most successful stratagems and a recognized leitmotif of his work. Patrick Heron wrote in 1956 that it was from Pasmore that Frost absorbed ‘his extremely subtle feeling for surface, for a sort of dry opulence of touch, which conferred great sensuosity and a richness of texture and colour upon what might otherwise have remained an austerely architectural configuration.’