SP4622
PATRICK HERON
Headingly, Leeds 1920 – 1999 Zennor
Orange, Yellow, Dull Green and White: August 1965
Signed, inscribed and dated 1965 on reverse
Canvas: 38 x 48 in / 96.5 x 121.9 cm
Frame size: 45 ½ x 48 in / 115.6 x 121.9 cm
Provenance:
Waddington Galleries, London, 1965, (stock number B 39008)
Private collection, United Kingdom
Exhibited:
London, Waddington Galleries, Patrick Heron, May 1967
Richard Demarco Gallery, Patrick Heron Retrospective, June – July 1967, cat no 85, illustrated pl 22
Kunstverein in Hamburg, Britisch Kunst Heute , 30th March – 12th May, 1968 cat no. 18, illustrated pl 12
Heron’s paintings of the mid to late 1960s are amongst his most recognizable works. He had perfected the ‘wobbly hard-edge’ manner that characterizes his work which enabled him to fully experiment with space and colour, the two concepts which had absorbed him since his earliest days as a painter.
Paintings from this period are frequently large in size with a strong visual impact. They were produced in a very specific way: the forms are drawn very quickly and spontaneously onto the prepared canvas, and then each area of pure unmixed colour is painted with small soft brushes. Each colour had to be painted in one layer a single session to ensure that the colours were uniform. Heron intended the viewer would be presented with pure colours in juxtaposition, the forms and their boundaries affecting the perceived spatial reference.
Patrick Heron wrote in 1969, ‘If I stand only eighteen inches away from a fifteen-foot canvas that is uniformly covered in a single shade of red, say, my vision being entirely monopolized by red I shall cease within a matter of seconds to be fully conscious of that red: the redness of that red will not be restored until a fragment of another colour is allowed to intrude, setting up a reaction. In is in this interaction between differing colours that our full awareness of any of them lies. So the meeting-lines between areas of colour are utterly crucial to our apprehension of the actual hue of those areas: the linear character of these frontiers cannot avoid changing our sensation of the colour in those areas...The line changes the colour of the colours on either side of it’ (Patrick Heron, ‘Colour in my painting’, Studio International, December 1969, pp 204-5)
PATRICK HERON
Headingly, Leeds 1920 – 1999 Zennor
Although Heron was born at Headingly, Leeds, much of his childhood was spent in West Cornwall. His father was a manufacturer who founded Cresta Silks and employed such artists as Paul Nash, Cedric Morris and McKnight Kauffer. Heron studied part-time at the Slade School of Art between 1937 and 1939, and during the Second World War, as a conscientious objector, he worked as a farm labourer and later as an assistant in the Bernard Leach Pottery, St Ives from 1944-1945, where he met Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and many other leading artists of the St Ives School. Considerably influenced by Braque and Matisse, his early figurative works included interiors, landscape and still lifes. During this period Heron was also an influential art critic, writing for the New English Weekly from 1945-1947, New Statesman and Nation from 1947-1950, the London correspondent for Arts, New York, from 1955 to 1958, and published his important book The Changing Forms of Art in 1955.
It was not until 1956 that Heron took up abstraction, inspired by the first exhibition of American Abstract Expressionism at the Tate Gallery that year. This change to abstraction coincided with his move to Eagles Nest, Zennor, and the following year he exhibited his first stripe paintings at the Redfern Gallery in a group exhibition entitled ‘Metavisual, Techiste, Abstract’. In 1958, he moved to Ben Nicholson’s former studio at Porthmeor and began to introduce the shapes that were to characterise his paintings of the 1960s and 1970s; many of the sharp-edged shapes are reminiscent of the aged Cornish coastline, while the rounded shapes recall the granite boulders in his garden. During the 1980s, Heron returned to a looser compositional format with scumbled surfaces but retained his interest in vibrant colour.
Heron won the Grand Prize at the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition in 1959 and a silver medal at the Sao Paolo Bienal in 1965. He had retrospective exhibitions at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1972 and at the Barbican Art Gallery in 1985; the same year he was included in the St Ives Exhibition at the Tate Gallery. He was created a CBE in 1977 and became a Trustee of the Tate Gallery in 1980. He died peacefully at his home in Zennor, Cornwall, in March 1999 at the age of 79.