Patrick Heron 1920-1999

Patrick Heron was one of Britain’s most significant
colourist painters, an artist and critic, who could contribute to the
development of, as well as the understanding of, abstract painting. His
startling experimentations in colour and the physical presence of his painting,
set him among the most visually stimulating British artists of the 20th
Century.

From his earliest years as an artist, Heron favoured gouache
for its opacity, rendering forms flat and ensuring unity across the paper’s
surface. Lacking the translucency (and hence depth) of watercolour, gouache
emphasises colour, and hence its function as a modifier of space. From 1962,
Heron sharpened the edges between colours, preoccupied by the interaction of
one upon the other. He was adamant that his gouaches were neither substitutes
for oil paintings nor preliminary sketches, or even ‘a means of trying out new
colour-shapes or configurations of dovetailed colour-shapes’ for use in later
works on canvas.¹ They were paintings in their own right.

As with his oil paintings, however, the gouaches stemmed
from rapid sketches on paper using ballpoint pen. He wrote, ‘I like the water
in the paint mixture to lead me, to suggest the scribbled drawing which gives
birth to the images’.² The tempo of the medium, which Heron described as ‘fast
moving fluidity’, influenced the resultant jigsaws of wobbly edged forms, which
owed a debt, too, to the granite rocks, coastline and ancient field patterns of
the landscape near Eagle’s Nest at Zennor in Cornwall, Heron’s permanent home
from 1956. As he acknowledged, ‘the rhythmic realities of a landscape where you
live permeate your mind and your awareness, and your consciousness from the
soles of your feet upwards’.³

¹ Patrick Heron, ‘A Note on my Gouaches’, text to accompany
an exhibition of gouaches at the Caledonian Club, Edinburgh (1985).

² Patrick Heron, ibid.

₃ Patrick Heron, interview with Martin Gayford (1997),
in Patrick Heron, ed. David Sylvester (London: Tate Publishing,
1998).

Private Collection, UK
Osborne Samuel, London
Private Collection, UK  (purchased from the above, 2006)