I was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and grew up in Windsor, near the Farmington and Connecticut Rivers.  I had already decided to be an artist by age five, according to my mother.  Drawing, reading, making things, building with blocks, and playing and exploring in the woods were all part of becoming an artist and naturalist.

At Williams College, Lee Hirsche’s very exciting Life Drawing Winter Study class convinced me that art was the most thrilling thing I could do.  I left Williams for the Boston Museum School, where I took drawing, painting and sculpture for four years.  After graduating, I continued to receive free art instruction by modeling at Boston University, for life-size sculptures, and at other art schools in the area.

In 1985 my mother (also an artist) and I moved to Friendship Long Island, Maine, where we lived for sixteen years in an old farmhouse that we gradually restored by hand.  We used only candles for light, cooked and heated with wood, got out water with a bucket and rope from a 100-year-old well, and slept twelve hours a night in the winter.

That was an apprenticeship as important or more so than my four years at art school, for I learned about the changing light through the seasons, from the flood of light at midsummer, amplified by light reflected off the surrounding sea, to the low, slanting daylight and immense night of winter.

I began painting landscapes in gouache while also designing paper dolls (Leopold the Frog, Natasha the Ballerina and other fantastical characters) for B. Shackman Company of New York.  I began painting in oils again in 1999, helped by a private grant and a month at the Vermont Studio Center.  I began painting in the island woods, where encounters with birds and animals, from sightings to calls, began to blend my passions for wildlife – the life of my familiar woods – and for representation of the lights, darks, and complex visual pattern of the spruce forest.

All along, I’ve also been fascinated by the human face, and I’ve drawn and painted portraits whenever I could get someone to pose.

artist · printmaker · custom framer

Upon graduating from Dartmouth in philosophy, Jonathan Frost declared, “I’m going to be an artist.” Despite a predilection for and early training in art, he had no idea how to go about making a living as an artist. Through years of work in mental health, carpentry, and adult literacy, he kept drawing and painting. In his forties he attended the MFA in Illustration as Visual Essay program at the school of Visual Arts in New York.

Older work on display includes landscapes, figure drawings, paintings based on Greek mythology, and etchings of urban landscapes. Most of the newer paintings represent early stages of what is to be an extensive body of work on the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60’s.

Over the past several years, Jonathan Frost has become known and highly respected in the mid-coast Maine region as a framer, artist and art instructor. He has also worked as a gallery manager and has designed and hung large shows of many artists’ work, including the Remove Tree show in 2002 and the Portraits of Conscience show through Amnesty International in 2006, both held at Lincoln Street Center for the Arts and Education.

Jonathan Frost is a fine artist, illustrator and picture framer, trained at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He now lives with his wife, artist Susan Beebe, in Rockland, Maine and owns and operates the Jonathan Frost Gallery.

You can see more about his recent Roller Derby Series here.

He works in oils for most of his easel pieces. Frost also is a master intaglio print maker. You can see some of his beautiful etchings and drypoints here.