In 1954 Terry Frost was appointed a Gregory Fellow at Leeds University, and the period he spent there was an incredibly important one for his development as an artist. The Gregory Fellowships were established in 1950 by Peter Gregory, and the programme brought poets, painters and sculptors to Leeds University, so that during the 1950s the city became an exciting centre for the arts. Bonamy Dobrée and Herbert Read advised Peter Gregory on the appointment of the Fellows – which over time included Frost as well as Reg Butler, Hubert Dalwood, Kenneth Armitage, Alan Davie and Trevor Bell as well as many others – with many chosen at formative moments in their careers. The University would benefit from creative artists working on campus and contributing to student life, while the artist would receive lodgings, a studio and a small stipend, allowing them to focus solely on their art. Frost arrived in Leeds in 1954 with a large and growing family, and the financial support that the Fellowship afforded him was sincerely welcome at this time. His Fellowship lasted for three years and it was to prove a pivotal time in his artistic career. His ethos for painting was 'a state of delight in front of Nature', and it was his interactions with the landscape surrounding Leeds, which had such a great impact on his work at this time. As Ronnie Duncan has stated, 'there was a further dimension to Terry's time in Leeds, one of incalculable significance to him creatively. He has himself called this "the true experience of black and white in Yorkshire". It arose from the impact made upon him by the bleak sparseness of the North, the landscape of the Wolds and the Dales and especially the high Pennines with limestone outcrops intersected by drystone walls running vertically over the contours of the hills.

Terry himself described one transformative experience while visiting Herbert Read at his house at Stonegrave in the Wolds, where they went out for a walk together: 'I drove through the snow and had lunch with Herbert Read at his house at Stonegrave. After lunch we went for a walk. Herbert lent me wellingtons and we struggled through the snow, so deep it came over the tops of the wellingtons; the angle of the hills seemed about 45 degrees and we had to lean to walk and counter the slope. It was a clear bright day and I looked up and saw the white sun spinning on the top of a copse. Afterwards and now I recall that I thought I saw a naples yellow blinding circle spinning on top of black verticals. The sensation was true. I was spellbound and, of course, when I tried to look again 'it' had gone, just a sun and a copse on the brow of a hill covered in snow. I do remember my heart almost stopped at the experience and it was gone. So I came back and painted Red, Black and White 1956.' Red, Black and White (Private Collection) is very similar to Khaki, Blue and Orange, painted in the same year and after this revelatory experience. Frost began to explore taut geometric shapes, often surrounded by black verticals, reminiscent of shafts of sunlight filtering through trees in a wood. In Khaki, Blue and Orange and Red, Black and White, the polygonal shape is strongly defined in the centre of the composition and represents the sun spinning on the tops of the trees. While the composition is strongly defined, Frost's approach began to become looser, with many of the vertical lines formed in this work by thinned paint being applied to the canvas, which was allowed to dribble down. Khaki, Blue and Orange has a wonderfully rich palette, painted as it was in Autumn of that year, with warm browns, umber, and ochre forming much of the colour scheme, accented by a warm, golden orange and a glimmer of blue, perhaps hinting at a body of water or the sky beyond. Frost's time in Leeds was a formative period for the artist and resulted in much of his most original work in the 1950s. Having discovered 'the true black and white experience of Yorkshire', he brought to this his signature flair for colour, filtering his delight in nature through this painterly lens. In 1958 he was to return to Cornwall, renewed by his experience of the North and energised by this incredible landscape. Khaki, Blue and Orange is a beautiful example of this incredibly fertile period for Frost, and a rare opportunity to acquire a painting from this important decade.