Ian Stephenson

Ian Stephenson (1934 – 2000) was an English abstract artist.
Stephenson trained at King's College, Durham along with Noel Forster and had his first solo show in London at the New Vision Centre in 1958. An exhibition of his work was exhibited at the Hayward Gallery in 1977 and his work can be found in the collections of the Tate, the British Council and Whitworth Art Gallery. His work was also featured in the 1966 film, Blow-Up by Michelangelo Antonioni.
Stephenson's work was characteristically made by splattering droplets of paint onto paper or canvas and repeating this with many different colours. Because the layers are applied quite widely the effect created in the finished paintings is determined not only by the colour and quantity of the spots of paint, but by the order in which they were applied.
"I love the tradition of an albion art and really my paintings have more to do with Constable’s snow than Tobey’s white writing. I have always known how I was to make pictures and speculations about the nature of painting stem from the style. The practice of painting is a defined discipline and desirably difficult.
Annealing and concealing colour. All of painting is camouflage, not least of all by means of subject matter whatever the sentiment. It is within the freaked skin of camouflage that the art resides. To be blessed with the contradictory nature of things. If there is no alternative to the way things are, then the picture must be more and more of what it is. Neural and neutral, the greyness scintillates. Overlapping and obliterated. Oblivion. Such is the practice of palimpsestial painting. Alas, it is as dilemmic as remembering to forget."( Ian Stephenson /ianstephenson.net)

Terry Frost - Light, Colour and Shape

Sir Terry Frost (born Terence Ernest Manitou Frost) (13 October 1915 – 1 September 2003) was an English abstract artist, who worked in Newlyn, Cornwall. Frost was renowned for his use of the Cornish light, colour and shape to start a new art movement in England. He became a leading exponent of abstract art and a recognised figure of the British art establishment.As soon as war was over he went to Birmingham College of Art, where he met Barrie Cook. However Frost quickly assumed that the action was elsewhere. At first attended Camberwell School of Art under Leonard Fuller. The following year, 1946 he removed for a year out to St. Ives School of Painting where his first solo exhibition was held in 1947 at G.B. Downing's bookshop, before returning to London and that autumn the Camberwell School of Art under Victor Passmore, Ben Nicholson and William Coldstream bringing him to paint his first abstract work in 1949. For three years he exhibited with the St Ives Society of Artists until in 1950 he was elected a member of the Penwith Society; he maintained a permanent connection with the Newlyn school. Already settled in the town by 1951 he worked as an assistant to the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. He was joined there by Roger Hilton, where they began a collaboration in collage and construction techniques.His first exhibition was the Leicester Galleries in the heart of London's West End. Frost's academic career included teaching at Bath Academy of Art, the Coventry Art College and was appointed on the recommendation of Herbert Read as the Gregory Fellow on Painting (1954-1956) at the University of Leeds. There he befriended the painter Stass Paraskos, who would later invite Frost to spend time working and teaching in Cyprus at the Cyprus College of Art.Later he became Artist in Residence and Professor of Painting at the Department of Fine Art of the University of Reading.At the Barbara Schaeffer Society in New York, 1960 he put on his first exhibition in USA. There he met many of American abstract expressionists, including Marc Rothko who, along with his wife Mel, became great friends. The success contributed to an award of the John Moore Prize for 1965. In 1992 he was elected a Royal Academician and he was knighted in 1998. A retrospective of his work was held in 2000. Wikipedia