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Lot Essay
In 1954 Frost was awarded a Gregory Fellowship at Leeds University where he stayed until 1957. The surrounding Yorkshire landscape made a deep impact on Frost's painting and the experience of being dwarfed by the steep sides of Gordale Scar fed into his work. In an interview with David Lewis in July 1993, Frost described his reaction to the Yorkshire landscape that he had experienced in the winter of 1955-6: 'Being in a vast cape of white and cold but brilliant space, the sharp air and smooth folds of white snow resting on fields, hanging on black lines ... walking was good because I went down and the white came up all around and yet it never touched me, so I was a black thing in a funnel of white with no space that I knew. I could not touch the sides, the space and silence went with me as I walked, and I was so small' (see D. Lewis, Terry Frost, Aldershot, 1994, pp. 73-6).
The paintings that Frost produced during this period differed from the harbour pictures that he had previously worked on while in St Ives (see lot 12). In 1956 Frost wrote in a letter to his friend, the artist, Lawrence Gowing, 'Things have changed since Cornwall, for now my starting points are much more difficult for me to think of. In fact I never give them a thought. It's the paint and colour on the surface that is my subject and what I can do with it. I sometimes talk about a subject when I'm pressed for it's so difficult to talk about something which is unknown to yourself and which every time you paint you're trying to find out ... There's such a big scale up here and black and white mean so much and when I paint I try to get those sensations through a strong attack on the canvas' (see C. Stephens, Terry Frost, London, 2000, p. 37).
The paintings that Frost produced during this period differed from the harbour pictures that he had previously worked on while in St Ives (see lot 12). In 1956 Frost wrote in a letter to his friend, the artist, Lawrence Gowing, 'Things have changed since Cornwall, for now my starting points are much more difficult for me to think of. In fact I never give them a thought. It's the paint and colour on the surface that is my subject and what I can do with it. I sometimes talk about a subject when I'm pressed for it's so difficult to talk about something which is unknown to yourself and which every time you paint you're trying to find out ... There's such a big scale up here and black and white mean so much and when I paint I try to get those sensations through a strong attack on the canvas' (see C. Stephens, Terry Frost, London, 2000, p. 37).