Sir Terry Frost

1915-2003

Born in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, Terry Frost first began to paint whilst held as a prisoner of war. Returning to England, he received an ex-serviceman’s grant and attended Camberwell School of Art in London.

Positions followed at the Universities of Leeds, Newcastle and Reading where he became Professor of painting from 1977-1981.

Frost held many exhibitions over the years varying in location from the ICA and Serpentine Galleries in London to the Bertha Schaeffer Gallery in New York. A retrospective exhibition of his was held at the Mayor Gallery, London in 1990 followed by a major retrospective ‘Terry Frost: Six Decades’ at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. His work is held in many corporate and private collections around the globe.

Terry Frost was one of the forerunners of abstract painting in Britain, and his use of vibrant colour and strong shapes can be traced back to his time as a prisoner of war, almost in antithesis to the drab, dull world in which he found himself. He believed the experience left him with a “heightened perception” of the world which encouraged him to paint.Painting and printing were always at the centre of his work and Frost considered the inseparable, with one medium creating ideas for another.

Terry frost was elected as a Royal Academician in 1992 and a knighthood followed in 1998. Sir Terry lived and worked in Cornwall until his death in 2003. In a tribute to the painter written before he died, the owners of Badcock’s Gallery in Newlyn, where frost lived, noted his unique ability to, “Allow the joy of life to emanate from his work and reduce the formal qualities of painting to a simplicity that is the unforgettable trade mark of this remarkable man”.