PAINTING NOT PAINTING
![BLUE WINTER](http://visualarts.britishcouncil.org/media/w540h540/collection/frost_terry_p364_blue_landscape.jpg)
© Estate of Terry Frost. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2023.
BLUE WINTER 1956
Sir Terry Frost (1915 – 2003)
Details
- Dimension
- 121 X 190.5 CM
- Media
- OIL ON HARDBOARD
- Accession number
- P364
Summary
In 1956, Terry Frost was away from the Cornish landscape with which he and his work is so closely associated , living in Yorkshire as the first ever Gregory Fellow in painting at the University of Leeds. This painting includes one of the characteristic features that entered his work in this period: long, flowing vertical lines, united in direction, but otherwise stubbornly individual. A pictorial device taken from the hand-laid dry stone walls that punctuate the rough hillsides of the Yorkshire Dales, they let Frost’s painting reflect the landscape’s controlled wilderness: “an honest solution to painting landscape on a flat surface, because that was what it looked like”.[1]
In the Tate’s Winter 1956, Yorkshire [2], they run most of the length of a piece of hardboard nearly 2½ metres long – larger than most of the works in the influential and notably plus-sized paintings of the show of American Abstract Expressionism in London that year, also at Tate. Frost wrote that the painting’s dizzy rush recalled sledging down in Leeds’ Roundhay Park with Kenneth Armitage – a Gregory Fellow in sculpture. Going down Hill 60 – so called because that, in miles, was thought to be the speed achievable on the way down – Frost remembered
“I went from half way, lost the sledge at the dip (concave form) (shallow curve) & sailed right on without the sledge slid along on my chest straight into the spectators, bowled several over.”
“Back home”, he continued, he tried to stay on the board:
“the continued excitement of Black & White led me to paint Winter 56. To take a line from top to bottom & keep it alive was a real challenge…”[3]
This comes from a letter to the writer, artist and curator Colin Painter in 1977, and is an example of another development of the Leeds years: the attachment of narratives to his work. From the perspective of the critic Chris Stephens, it’s a “good example of the artist’s use of a jolly story to obscure more serious aspects of a painting.”[4] As late as his ‘Six Decades’ retrospective at the Royal Academy in 2000,[5] this kind of literary glossary remained an important part of Frost’s practice, while the technical aspects Stephens refers to are visible in the preparatory drawings Frost made as he worked out how best to turn experience into successful painting.[6]
The anecdotes highlight the relationship between Winter 1956, Yorkshire and Blue Winter (1956). Rather than hurtling down the lines, here, the eye is taken across them, from left-to-right in the battered Bedford van was driving at the time. Along the way, the bisected moon-shape hoves into better view:
This painting is about driving home from Harrogate, with the landscape on my right. It was white with a beautiful blue moon: it had been snowing. Luckily it was very late and there was no other traffic. Here is my blue moon at different stages, and the landscape […][7]
Tom Overton, 2010.
[1] Discussing Red Black and White, Leeds (1955), Terry Frost: Six Decades [exh. cat.](London: Royal Academy, 2000), p.32.
[2] Oil on board, 246.7 x 125 cm, London, Tate Gallery.
[3] TGA [Tate Gallery Archive] 7919.3.5.
[4] Chris Stephens, Terry Frost (London: Tate, 2000), p.39.
[5] Six Decades, p.32.
[6] Mel Gooding, Terry Frost: Act and Image, Works on Paper Through Six Decades [exh. cat.](London: Belgrave Gallery, 2000).
[7] Six Decades, p.32.
Glossary
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Curator
A person who creates exhibitions or who is employed to look after and research museum objects.
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Landscape
Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.
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Oil
A medium in which ground pigments are mixed to produce a paste or liquid that can be applied to a surface by a brush or other tool; the most common oil used by artists is linseed, this can be thinned with turpentine spirit to produce a thinner and more fluid paint. The oil dries with a hard film, and the brightness of the colour is protected. Oil paints are usually opaque and traditionally used on canvas.
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Painting
Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.
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Sculpture
A three-dimensional work of art. Such works may be carved, modelled, constructed, or cast. Sculptures can also be described as assemblage, in the round, relief, and made in a huge variety of media. Contemporary practice also includes live elements, as in Gilbert & George 'Living Sculpture' as well as broadcast work, radio or sound sculpture.