oil on canvas, 60cm x 60cm,
Iain White, 2009, £280
As with the three works entitled Brilliant Space forming a triptych, this work is inspired by the British artist Terry Frost who is normally associated with the St Ives school and with the implicit references to the Cornish landscape in his work. However, in 1954 Frost was awarded a Gregory Fellowship at Leeds University. The surrounding Yorkshire landscape made a deep impact on Frost's painting. In an interview in July 1993, Frost described his reaction to the Yorkshire landscape that he had experienced in the winter of 1955-6:
'Being in a vast cape of white and cold but brilliant space, the sharp air and smooth folds of white snow resting on fields, hanging on black lines‘.
It is the pattern of these snow covered fields and the stark tracery of the field boundaries that prompted the recognition of a parallel with the elongated field pattern that characterises the spatial signature of highland crofting townships.
Like the other three paintings this work draws its inspiration from a real place but like Terry Frost’s works it distances itself from simple representation by ‘abstracting’ and re-imagining the pattern through the manipulation in paint of the picture plane
