About

Frost was born in Sydney and his mother and sister moved to New York city when he started art school in his early twenties. The family's NYC connection led to regular visits to New York to set up a studio to paint and to have several exhibitions in New York City and Austin, Texas. He would later undergo research for his PhD and identify significant points of connections with many American artists. Richard Diebenokorn and Phillip Guston would for Frost reveal a template for an approach painting that was not bound by genre and one “ that involved a structured, methodological and rules driven practice”. Joan Mitchell and Paul Cezanne are two of the most important painters for Frost in that their work marks two of the significant high points for painting in the 19th and 20th century. 

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He is very much a location driven artist creating bodies of works during residencies and field trips in Australia and abroad. Where sea meets land and night meets day Frost immerses himself in what he describes as a convergence of light and place.  He builds up thick, luscious layers of paint to give his works a highly appealing tactile quality. While at times the works are loosely representative, much of the work leans into abstraction and for Frost, “aims to intensify a heightened oscillation between my method driven representational process; and the interpretation by the audience.

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Frost has been a practicing artist for over thirty years with his first Sydney solo show in 1996. The exhibition of paintings and plein air studies was titled Eclectic Antarctica and built on around 100 gouache paintings created during a working trip to Antarctica in the summer of 1992. This pivotal experience would lead to Frost founding the Theme Polar Arts Program that created opportunities for around 350 artists from around the world to travel to Antarctica and the Arctic.

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He is a graduate of the National Art School East Sydney Australia receiving his BFA with a Distinction in painting. He has travelled widely conducting research for his PhD candidacy on public art in the cities of Brasilia, Beijing, New York and Canberra.  He has worked as an exhibiting artist for 28 years with four solo shows in New York (2000, 2002, 2004 & 2016), a solo show in Austin Texas in 2016 and group exhibitions in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Guangzhou.

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He has had art residencies in Texas, Antarctica, Norway and Long Island New York. He won the Kings Art Prize in 2004, the Hills Art Prize 2018, the Mosman Art Prize Viewer’s Choice in 2017 and Highly Commended in the 2021 Flow Contemporary Watercolour Prize. He has been a finalist in the Archibald 2017, Wynne 2021 and Sulman 2021 prizes and a number of other art prizes, including the Paddington Art Prize, Adelaide Perry, the NSW Plein Air Prize, the Gallipoli Prize and the Kedumba Drawing Award in 2020. His works are in collections around Australia including Mosman Art Gallery, Wollongong City Gallery and the University of Wollongong as well as private collections around the world. He currently works between his studio on the East coast of Australia and his studio in Long Island NY.