Exhibitors
Lucy Johnson
| Artist: | TERRY FROST (1915-2003) |
| Title: | THRUST (1958) |
| Medium: | Sir Terry Frost, Thrust, watercolour, Austin Desmond, Mayor Gallery, pape, |
| Dimensions: | 0.00cm high 0.00cm wide |
| Description/Expertise: | Signed `& dated ‘ `Frost 58 ’ in pencil on lower right
Titled on reverse Ink and wash on paper In 1958 Frost was working from Porthmeor Studios in St Ives, having returned with his family from his teaching post in Leeds the previous year. Contemporary St Ives was again a hotbed of artistic activity, with Roger Hilton, Barbara Hepworth, Bernard Leach, Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron and Brian Wynter all working in the town or nearby. Frost was already an established figure, with two solo shows at the Leicester Galleries to his name and a third that year. In the same year he moved to Waddington Galleries, where he would have exhibitions regularly until 1978. The Tate purchased a first picture in 1959, and Frost's career was also poised to go international with his first American solo show, in 1960, at the Bertha Schaeffer Gallery in New York - a critical success which was attended by American heavyweights de Kooning, Rothko, Kline, Newman, and Motherwell. Frost characterised these years as 'a period of total confidence...any mark I made seemed to be fine.' This work Thrust is strongly situated in the development of themes from Frost's Leeds years of 1954 to 1957 and before, to those of his work of the Sixties; and demonstrates motifs present in work from across his career. In the preceding years in Leeds he made a series of paintings which represented a movement through a landscape in abstract, for example Winter 1956, Yorkshire (Tate Collection). The fascination with motion and force and how these could be rendered in composition was first explored earlier in the decade, and extended through to later work such as the Laced, and Suspended Forms series. Here this enquiry is clearly present, both in the title Thrust and in the strong sense of propulsion of the two emphasised v or u forms towards the centre of the image. In all of Frost's work there exists a tension between abstraction and figuration - he never relinquishes to the complete abstraction advanced by Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo and others. From the late fifties into the sixties Frost had a particular approach to the issue: he gave his apparently abstract forms coded meanings. The clearest example of this is the V-shaped wedge, signifying the female nude, of which Frost himself explains firstly the compositional properties: I used wedges a lot to tighten up form... If you've got tightness on a flat surface, the structure is a certainty, it can't fall apart. He goes on to explain the motif's significance to a painting's content: The chevrons and wedges are all part of the figure. The chevrons become nipples often, and then the penetration is a chevron as well. In paintings of the following years, from Black Wedge and White Nude of 1959, to Three Graces and Force 8 of 1960 the wedges are strongly defined. Here in Thrust the motif in development is less sharp, but nonetheless present and active and fundamental to the image; pressing in from two sides and providing a strong contraction of focus. Frost mentions the contemporary domination of Henry Moore and 'his lying-down things' as contributing to his desire to represent the reclining female form. Equally: There was always that side of me. I have to face the fact that I was a terrific flirt. I think Hilton and I were having arguments about the figure at that time, and Lanyon had done a few figure paintings, so there was a bit of a battle on. I was trying to stick to abstraction, but occasionally my romantic side, my love-making side, would take over. Chevrons continue to appear into Frost's late work, and the more rounded but still directional C- and D-forms are also a dominant motif. For an artist often associated with colour the subtlety with which he manipulates a work in black and grey tones is masterly. Ronnie Duncan, friend of Frost from the Leeds years, and collector, writes: Frost uses black with an uncanny authority and with the ability to evoke more colour from it than any other artist of our time, including Kline and Motherwell. (No wonder his favourite quotation from Rochester is “All colours are contained in black”). Further reading Gooding, M. and Carlisle, E. Terry Frost (exhibition catalogue, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2000) Lewis, D. Terry Frost (Lund Humphries, 2000) Stephens, C. Terry Frost, (St Ives Artists series) (Tate Publishing, 2000) |
| Provenance: | Austin Desmond Fine Art, label on reverse
The Mayor Gallery, label on reverse |
OTHER WORKS
 Sir William Nicholson (1872-1949) : The Ruined Castle, a view of Dunure from the... |
 Roger Hilton (1911-1975) : Landscape Study |
| Contact dealer | Dealer details |