Born in October 1915 at Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. Terry Frost attended evening classes in art at the age of sixteen, then worked in various jobs but mainly mainly concerned with radio and electricity. He started painting while a prisoner of war in Germany 1943. On returning to England he moved to St Ives 1946 and studied under Leonard Fuller; then studied from 1947 at the Camberwell School of Art under Pasmore and Coldstream.

Terry Frost became a member of the Penwith Society, St Ives in 1950 and had a first one-man exhibition in London at the Leicester Galleries in 1952 and in New York at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in 1960. He lived in St Ives until 1963 before moving to Banbury.