When the second world war came, Frank Rosen interrupted his Bachelor of Commerce studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, to serve as a commander in the South Africa Tank Corps in the Allied Forces throughout East Africa, Abyssinia, He had no idea he could draw but felt compelled to record his experiences somehow. A naturally gifted and lyrical writer, he began to keep a war diary extant to this day, in which small painstaking images slowly began to accompany his writing. First in pencil, then pen, then in colour using a minute set of pastels and later from a child-sized watercolour set bought at an ‘everything store’ along the way, Rosen’s artistic talent began to emerge.

He writes in the diary:

‘I have no instruction – I rely solely upon my instinct, which frequently cries out with disgust at the incompetence of my wanton fingers.’

In Italy at the end of the war, he was profoundly stirred by the magnificent drawings and paintings by artists whose work he had never had the opportunity to see until then, and this fired his ambition to lead a life of artistic creativity.