Patrick Heron

by Mel Gooding

Artist: Patrick Heron
Published: 1994
Publisher: Phaidon Press Ltd, London
Edition: -
Format: Paperback
Height: 29cm
Pages: 272
Illustrations: Illustrated throughout in b/w and colour

£24.95

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Authors Bio
Artists Bio

Patrick Heron

This volume features Patrick Heron, born in 1920, and one of the leading artists of his generation and a key figure in abstract art. He was associated with the St Ives group, and has been obsessed by colour and light in a long succession of paintings reviewed here. Now out of print.

Mel Gooding is an art critic, writer and exhibition organiser. He graduated M.A (English) from the University of Sussex in 1966. He has written many catalogue texts and over the last fifteen years contributed extensively to the art press and to magazines and newspapers. His monographs on artists include Bruce McLean(1990), Michael Rothenstein's Boxes (1991) Patrick Heron (1994), Gillian Ayres (2001) Ceri Richards (2002), Patrick Hayman (2005), John Hoyland: Imagination and Image (2006) and herman de vries: chance and change (2006). He has written on art and architecture: William Alsop Architect (1992), Joze Plecnik :The National and University Library, Ljubljana (1997); Public: Art; Space (1998) Abstract Art (2001); Song of the Earth: European Artists in the Landscape (2002). With Redstone Press he has edited Surrealist Games (1991), Alphabets and Other Signs (1991), The Paradox Box (1996), The Playful Eye (1999), Psychobox (2004), and several Redstone Diaries. He has curated many exhibitions, including Ceri Richards Graphics at the National Museum of Wales and tour in 1979-80, F.E. McWilliam: Retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1989, Michael Rothenstein: A Retrospective at Stoke on Trent and tour 1989-90, William Furlong/ Alan Johnston/ Simon Patterson/ Bruce McLean/ Prunella Clough/ Gillian Ayres etc. at the Customs House, South Shields (1995-1999), Mary Fedden: Retrospective at the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, 1996, a select retrospective of the Czech sculptor Stanislav Kolibal at the 1998 Edinburgh Festival, Themes and Variations: Ceri Richards Retrospective at the National Museum of Wales and tour (2002-3), Gillian Ayres: Select Retrospective, Royal West of England Academy, 2004. He was Senior Research Fellow at Edinburgh College of Art from 1998 to 2005. He was made a professor at Wimbledon School of Art in 2006.

Artists Biography

(b Leeds, 30 Jan 1920; d St Ives, 20 March 1999). English painter and critic. In the 1950s he became identified with the ST IVES group of painters, although the roots of his aesthetic date back to earlier experiences, which included working as a designer for his father’s firm, Cresta Silks (1935–9, 1944–50), and assisting at Bernard Leach’s pottery (1944–5). Insights gained through friendships with Herbert Read, T. S. Eliot, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and Ivon Hitchens were also important. Influenced by Braque and Matisse, he evolved a flat, linear style in a series of still-lifes and interiors such as the ambitious Christmas Eve (1951; artist’s col., see 1985 exh. cat., p. 29), in which the lightly filled-in colours create an airy, luminous effect. In his writings as a critic for the New English Weekly, New Statesman and Nation and Arts (New York) between 1945 and 1958, Heron was unconvinced of the necessity for pure abstraction. His early paintings are in an ART INFORMEL style, but he then began to produce paintings composed of horizontal bands of colour, such as Horizontal Stripe Painting (1957–8; London, Tate). These simple bars of thinned oil paint, softly brushed on in one movement so the colours intermingle, still seem to refer to coastal landscape in their form and colour, bringing them as close to Hitchens’s abstractions from nature as to the Post-painterly Abstraction of Morris Louis, whose work Heron claimed to have foreshadowed. From the 1960s he concentrated on simple forms such as rectangles and a repertory of distinctive shapes that emphasized decorative values and contrasts of saturated colour. In the 1970s he favoured large surfaces of colour painted with small Japanese brushes (e.g. Long Cadmium with Ceruleum in Violet (Boycott), 1977; London, Waddington Gals), relaxing these self-imposed restrictions in the 1980s in more informal abstractions that hinted once again at landscape associations.