Bertha Schaefer

New York, Bertha Schaefer Gallery, Patrick Heron, October 1965;
Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, John Moores Liverpool Exhibition 7, 1969, lent by Patrick Heron;
London, Whitechapel Gallery, Patrick Heron: Recent Paintings and Selected Earlier Canvasses, June – July 1972, no.20 illustrate𓃲d in the exhibition catalogue. 

 

Patrick Heron, The Colour of Colour, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin 1ඣ979, illustrated, pl.83.

Original canvas. There are some minor abrasions, scuff marks and spots of dirt to the paint surface in all four quadrants. There are two small areas where there are a few miniscule specks of paint loss: the first is along the lower edge in the lower right quadrant and the second is along the right edge in the lower right quadrant. Under ultraviolet light certain small areas across the canvas fluoresce but these appear to relate to marks on the surface rather than retouchings. Held in a wooden slip frame, slightly bowed along the upper edge. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Heron's paintings of the late 1960s and early 1970s are probably his most instantly recognisable works, th🦩e '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 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 overlap. Heron's intention was that the viewer would thus be presented with pure colours in juxtaposit🎃ion, 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.' (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 broaderꦍ context of painting of the period, the vivacity of Heron's art is imm﷽ediately clear and still looks remarkable at the space of over four decades.