Sir Terrence Frost was a British artist known as a leading figure of abstraction in the United Kingdom. Frost was born in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire in 1915. After leaving school at age fourteen he worked at a major British manufacturing company prior to entering the British Army at the age of 17. During World War II, he served in France, the Levant, and Greece. He was captured in 1941 while serving in Crete and held in Bavaria, where he met painter Adrian Heath, who encouraged him to start painting. After the war, Frost enrolled at the Birmingham College of Art then at the Camberwell School of Art before departing for the St. Ives School of Painting, where he was given his first solo exhibition in 1947. Two years later he painted his first abstract work while exhibiting with the St. Ives Society of Artists. In 1951, he worked as a studio assistant for British sculptor Barbara Hepworth, who was also based in the seaside town among other notable artists of the time like Ben Nicholson.
The 1950s also saw the beginning of Frost’s work as an academic instructor in art departments and schools across the country, a career which lasted for more than a decade. During this formative time, he also began to shift his painting style to abstracted images of nature. His paintings of boat scenes from St. Ives harbor were inspired by his careful observations of the movement of the sea in addition to the bobbing of docked boats, which the artist noted as he regularly walked along the quayside. In these abstracted scenes, thin lines form the outlines of boats in succession while the sea appears to swell in the background and foreground. The perspective of these paintings appears to be from multiple angles, as the spatiality of the scene is skewed despite the frontal perspective of the boats with the absence of a vanishing line. Frost’s paintings, including examples of his St Ives boat series are collected by institutions across the globe, including the Tate Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh. The latter part of his career was distinguished by regular exhibitions at galleries in the United Kingdom and New York, including at the Royal Academy and the St. Ives Tate. Frost died in 2003 at the age of 87.
