It is no exaggeration to say that with the death on Monday, in St Julia's Hospice, Hayle, only a few weeks before his 88th birthday, of Sir Terry Frost RA, a light has been switched off. Cornwall's own "Sunshine Boy", the county will be that much darker without him.
Possessor of a tremendous sense of humour, talking to him was always as good as a tonic. Never pretentious, I remember a conversation with him in his garden when, with the large blue rims of his spectacles reflecting the superb blue sweeps of the bay that stretches below his home and studio high on the hill above Newlyn, he spoke of Picasso's early passion for the colour blue and with typical candour confessed: "The only blue period I ever had was when a paint factory burnt down near Leeds, and I had all the blue paint that was thrown out." A man who was to become one of this country's leading abstract artists, born in Leamington Spa, he came relatively late to painting. Leaving school at the age of 14, he never forgot the ten and tenpence a week he earned then or the Hunger Marches of the time. An army reservist, he was called up soon after the start of the Second World War and two years later, while serving as a Commando in Crete, was taken prisoner and subsequently spent almost four years behind the wire. He freely admitted that this was his university. "For the first time I met people who read, who knew about poetry, music and painting. I discovered, too, that there's more good in people than bad, even in the chap who stole my bread!" It was in Stalag 353 in Bavaria that he met the artist Adrian Heath, and it was him who encouraged Terry Frost to paint and also pointed him towards Cornwall.
He first came to the far west in 1946 when he lived, with his wife Kathleen, in a caravan at Carbis Bay. He attended Leonard Fuller's School of Painting in St Ives and Penzance School of Art, where he obtained a diploma in design which helped him qualify for a government grant and gained him admission to Camberwell School of Art where he came under the influence of Victor Pasmore and where he made his first abstract painting.
In 1950 he came back to Cornwall, to St Ives where he worked as an assistant to Barbara Hepworth. "For 18 shillings a day we helped carve her Contrapuntal Forms for the Festival of Britain." It was an encounter with physical shapes that became something of a watershed in his career. Indeed, the shock was so great that he stopped painting for several months, and it was then that he began experimenting with collage which, to a certain extent, has been present in his work ever since.
"I was learning all the time then, from walking through the landscape with Peter Lanyon and Roger Hilton to having Ben Nicholson in his studio next to mine, it was marvellous - a time when no reputations had been made and we shared everything."
One who since then has made an indelible mark upon the art world at large, in February of this year his work filled the Tate St Ives, and only recently a new book on his life and work "Warm Frost" was published by Alison Hodge, such was his strength that there can be very few unable to recognise his work at a glance. Knighted by the Queen in 1998, an artist who exhibited throughout the world and received almost every honour to be had in his field, he never failed to entertain or excite. Whatever medium he used, whatever idea he pursued, his creations reflected his sunny personality.
Although much of his time was spent in passing on his wisdom and wit to others, he taught at Bath Academy of Art, Corsham, was the Gregory Fellow in Painting at Leeds University, lectured at the Universities of Reading and Newcastle, he is still a Professor Emeritus at Reading, and even taught at summer schools in Norway and Canada, he always returned to Cornwall where, as he said: "I'm in touch with forever, I feel it through my feet."
It was 19 years ago that he left St Ives for Newlyn where, until quite recently and despite being ill, he has been working on his latest project, a portfolio of illustrations of the words of the Spanish poet Frederico Garcia Lorca
Ever generous in his response to and support of local appeals and events, a colourful character in every sense, a lover of life and laughter, his death leaves a hole in the county's and the country's canvas impossible to fill. To say that he will be greatly missed by his army of admirers is an understatement, but no one will miss him more than his wife Kathleen, their daughter Katie and their five sons, Adrian, Anthony, Matthew, Simon and Stephen.
The funeral service is at 11 am on Tuesday, in St Peter's Church, Newlyn
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