Patrick Heron

Waddington Galleries, London
Acquired from the above in 1982

Austin, University Art Museum, University of Texas. Paintings by Patrick Heron, 1965-1977, 1978, p. 14, illustrated in colour
Eindhoven, Bijenkorf (& travellling), Kunst over de drempel, 1985
Zevenaar, Turmac, 30 jaar Peter Stuyvesant Collectie: Hommage à Spinoza, 1990
Sevilla, World EXPO '92, Art in the Factory, 1992
Paris, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, l'Art actif, 1992

Renilde Hammacher-van den Brande, Art works, International modern art in the industrial working environment, an experiment over more than thirty years, Amsterdam 1992, p. 95, illustrated in colour
Mel Gooding, Patrick Heron, London 1994, p.200, illustrated in colour

Colours: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is slightly more contrasting and less red in the original. Condition: Original canvas. The corners are very slightly loose. There is a small circular network of fine surface craquelure (patterned like tree rings) to the middle of the orange pigment by the upper right edge and a further light network beneath the paint surface to the centre of the purple pigment in the upper right quadrant. Otherwise in good overall condition with some excellent passages of impasto and paint texture throughout. Under ultraviolet light, there is a vertical repaired tear (approx 8cm. long) along the left edge in the red pigment to the lower left of the orange circle. There is also an area of very fine retouching to the aforementioned network of circular surface craquelure to the orange pigment and some tiny flecks of retouching to the bottom right corner. Held in a simple metal frame.
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Heron's paintings of the late 1960s and early 1970s are probably his most instantly recognisable works, the 'wobbly hard-edge' manner he had perfected allowing him to fully experiment with space and colour, the twin concepts that had occupied him since the earliest part of his career.

The paintings he produced in this period are mostly of substantial size and were produced in a very specific way, with the forms drawn in very quickly and spontaneously onto the prepared canvas, often in a matter of seconds, and then each area of pure unmixed colour painted in with small soft brushes. Each colour had to be painted in a single session to ensure that the colours remained uniform, and each is just a single layer of paint with no overlapping. Heron's intention was that the viewer would thus be presented with pure colours in juxtaposition, the forms and their boundaries affecting the perceived spatial relationships.

The scale of these paintings, and thus the visual impact of the meeting points of these large areas of vivid colour, is a key element in their success.

'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 monopolised 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. It 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.' (From: Patrick Heron, 'Colour in my Painting', Studio International, December 1969, pp.204-5).

As the artist was to observe, the final brushstroke which covered the last trace of the white ground marked the moment at which all the elements came together in balance and the colours began to function with and against each other. The sheer involvement of painting these pictures is clear from a close inspection of the surface, with their network of fine fluid brushstrokes declaring the joy of painting. This immediacy allows the paintings to carry huge impact and vigour. When seen in the broader context of painting of the period, the vivacity of Heron's art is immediately clear and still looks remarkable at the space of over four decades.