“The love of colour has to be real. In fact like love. And it must be concerned with reason, with the logical extension of colour to its breaking point in order to discover the relations of colour and form, and together a final totality and authority.”

Managed to catch the Terry Frost exhibition at the Cork Street branch of Flowers (Flowers say Kingsland Road is still a thing, I do have my doubts). I’m not big on knighthoods and all that, I was keen to see some of the paintings of the late Sir Terry Frost (1915-2003) in the flesh in the reverence of a quiet well lit art gallery. 

“Something that is not a reproduction or delineation of nature; he was interested in painting space, light and colour and the complex relationship between the three components in the world”.

These works are of a time and place now, a space, it is still a good place, still a time to be lost in and it might be a little dark in the Cork Street space while we wait for the Sunshine to hit London but Frost with his renowned use of the Cornish light, colour and shape is bringing a touch of warmth to a cold day at the end of April. He is of course credited with being part of in indeed starting a new art movement in England. He did become a leading exponent of abstract art and a recognised figure of the British art establishment back there, he was actually encouraged to paint for the first time by a fellow prisoner of war (painter Adrian Heath) in a camp in Bavaria back in the early 1940s, he was already in his 30s by that point, that four or so years in a prisoner of war camp surely impacted on these big bright bold (beautiful) freedom of those abstract pieces of form and exhilarating colour, he headed to St Ives School of Art in 1946, and of course you (rather obviously) can’t really get a sense of the joy of colour or the glorious size of things with mere reproductions in a book, you can’t have those quiet conversations with the paintings, you can really get the sense of an artist from a book and yes it was a treat (not to be taken for granted) to be in the gallery almost alone with these pieces. (sw)

The Terry Frost exhibition carries on until 11th May 2024 at Flowers, 21 Cork Street, London W1 3LZ. Open Monday – Saturday 11am-6pm

As always, do the clicking on the image thing to see the whole picture or to run the slide show