Hessian and Black Figure

Mel Gooding comments, 'His [Frost's] play with recurrent forms and motifs, and his virtuosic manipulation of surface colour and texture, constitute what can properly be called the constructive aspect of Frost's art: a process, largely intuitive, of composing, of image-building within the confine of the support, conditioned by the 'materials and their existence as form and colour'. It is worth repeating that this process has a more than formal significance: this 'dynamic equilibrium' between colour-shapes, tensions of line and stroke on the plane, colour, tone, translucency and opacity are the abstract components of a pictorial drama. Frost has called this 'the myth': it is the 'content' of abstract painting, what replaces the mythological (classical or religious) subject matter of classic post-Renaissance painting' (see Exhibition catalogue, Terry Frost: Six Decades, London, Royal Academy of Arts, 2000, pp. 21-22).