Hello, I'm Cresti Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1998 and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

My car's the way this week is a painter. He was brought up by his grandparents in Lemmington Spa,

left school at 14 and when the Second World War broke out became a commando.

He was captured and spent four years in a prisoner of war camp in Germany.

It was here he discovered he could draw and paint. It was a kind of university, he says.

And once the war was over he moved to the artist's community in St. Ives where he developed a passion for modern art and abstract form.

Painting he believes is all about the imagination and puts his to work on big colourful works where familiar images are evoked in dazzling shapes, circles, stripes and wedges.

Now one of Britain's foremost artists, his work is to be found in the Tate, the Victorian Albert Museum and galleries all over the world.

If it feels right in my head, my heart and my big toe, he says, then I know I've got it right. He is Satere Frost.

So shape and colour Terry are of paramount importance to you is one more important than the other.

Well I think colour because you see that when you're walking a med all the time.

But is there a right colour in the right place in abstract?

For instance I tried yellows, I did 365 yellows until I ran out of paper and that was a valuable lesson to me.

Why?

Because you ask a person what colour and they say yellow, I wonder which yellow.

And when I found out I could do 365, I then could do that with reds and black.

And blacks indeed, lots of blacks.

And the most important thing I found out, but you find that out by trying.

But when you're doing an individual painting, is there for that abstract painting the right yellow or the right black?

How do you know when it's right?

Well I usually know before I start the kind of yellow I'm going to use.

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