Date: No Date
Dimensions: 32.50 x 42cm
Medium: Gouache
Collection: Niland Collection

Description:
Born in England, Stella Frost is one of a number of women artists who worked in Ireland during the 1940s and 1950s about whom little is known. She joined the Dublin Society of Painters c. 1935, probably with the encouragement of her friends Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone. Although not a regular exhibitor, she held her first solo exhibition at the Dublin Painter’s Gallery in St. Stephen’s Green in October 1935. A review in the Irish Times called it a ‘remarkable exhibition’ and noting that images of Yugoslavia, Herzegovina and the Balearic Islands were included, commented on the intense reds, greens and purples that dominated the show (1).

The southern European landscape depicted in Red Earth may be inspired by the mineral-red soil on Ibiza, and other Balearic Islands, which was historically used as pigment to make paint. Frost exhibited two paintings of Ibiza in the RHA of 1935 suggesting that she had recently visited the island.

An article about Andorra published in the Irish Times in January 1927 is evidence that Frost wrote as well as painted, and in 1957 she edited the book “A Tribute to Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett” which records her admiration of and friendship with the two artists (2).

(1)’Miss Stella Frost’s Paintings: Remarkable Exhibition’, Irish Times, October 21, 1935.
(2) Stella Frost (ed.), A Tribute to Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett, Dublin, 1957.

Written by Riann Coulter