Heron is seen working on this gouache during a 1982 BBC Omnibus programme on his work introduced by Richard Baker. It was painted at his home, Eagle’s Nest in Zennor, Cornwall, just three years after the sudden death of his wife Delia in 1979.  Heron frequently wrote and talked about the importance of the edges of a painting and in the BBC programme emphasised how one’s eye is propelled from the edges to the centre. In a painting the lines of definition between each shape and colour are maintained with brushstrokes sometimes overlapping the adjoining colour and shape by millimetres, sometimes the white of the paper or canvas showing through like the receding sea shore leaving the trace of a line, colours distorting colours.  His compositional shapes are derived from what he refers to as the pristine, primeval landscape of Cornwall with its extraordinary white light reflected all round by the surrounding sea, by the headland in front and behind his home, by the rocks, inlets and coves.  In this composition, the vivid blue dominates the upper right and in the programme he is seen squeezing paint directly onto the paper from the tube, brushing and diluting until it becomes a solid inlet of blue sea surrounded in a field of red, orange and green at the edges.

‘The work of Patrick Heron is bound up with what is probably the most crucial series of events in British art since the war: the impact of the new American painting, the absorption of its influence and, eventually, a reaction against it and an attempt to go beyond it. The fact that Heron is exceptionally articulate (having been one of the best English art critics of the post-war period) means that his development can be followed stage-by-stage in a very clear way, which provides valuable insight into the development of recent British painting as a whole.’  Ronald Alley, Patrick Heron: the development of a painter, Studio International, Vol.174, No. 891, July / August, 1967.

42.5 x 50.5 cms (16.70 x 19.85 in)
P.O.A.