Abstract art anchored in the landscape of St Ives, Cornwall

Terry Frost came to painting late, after serving as a commando in World War II and enduring four years as a prisoner of war in Germany. After he had studied painting at Camberwell with fellow artist Victor Pasmore, he worked as Hepworth’s assistant. 

When he arrived in 1946 to join the St Ives group, he only had enough money to rent a caravan and he relied on a teaching day job to make ends meet. Gradually, he became close with Nicholson who admired the sense of balance and emotional weight in his work. So transfixed was Nicholson with Frost’s abstractions that he once stood in total silence before one of his red, white and black paintings for two hours.   

For Frost, his artistic practice had nothing to do with imitation or representation. ‘When I am painting’, he once wrote, ‘I am not concerned with theory, however much thinking I may have done before I started to paint [...] Thinking about painting while painting would be like rowing a boat with the bung out.’ Fascinated by the mystery of life itself, he explained that ‘if we dare to let our intuition or inner self really see, then we know we are a mystery and art is part of our mystery.’ 

As part of the younger generation of St Ives artists to move to the village in the mid 1950s, Patrick Heron’s work responded to the freshness, immediacy and openness of abstract expressionism. Recognising its radical simplicity, his work emphasised bold colour, brushwork and all over design to create complex patterns of interlocking shapes.

In the spring of 1956, he began a series of garden paintings inspired by the flowering azaleas and camellias in his garden at Eagle’s Nest, Zennor, Cornwall. With its powerful vertical dabs of paint, Azalea Garden is a rich tapestry of abstract energy.

His later, ‘stripe’ paintings are also said to be inspired by the view of the sunset from his studio window at Eagle’s Nest. For their use of strong, saturated colours, they have been compared to American Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko’s mature works who, coincidentally, visited St Ives in 1958 as a guest of German-born artist Paul Feiler. 

In 1957, Sandra Blow went to the Cornish village of Zennor to visit Heron and his wife Delia. By then, St Ives was internationally recognised as an important outpost for the development of modern art and, since she was so besotted with the place, Blow rented a cottage in nearby Tregerthen for a year. 

Not far from the cottage – which was famously occupied by D H Lawrence during the First World War – she rented a studio high up on the hill of St Ives. It was there that Blow created large-scale abstract works that incorporated discarded materials.

Reflecting on her artistic practice and her desire to create a balanced composition, Blow explained how she always sought to find what she called ‘startling rightness.’ For her, it could be ‘any shape or colour: the crucial thing is that although perfect in its place, there is an unexpected quality about it, an element of surprise.’