Patrick Heron

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Patrick Heron (30 January 1920 – 20 March 1999) was a British abstract and figurative artist, essayist, and polemicist who lived in Zennor, Cornwall. Heron was named as one of the top painters of his time.

Heron's paintings, which were primarily his art, were most influential in the dissemination of modernist paintings through his critical writing and especially his use of color and light.

He is best known for both his early figurative and non-figurative works, which over the years have sought to investigate the possibility of making all areas of the painting of equal importance.

His work appeared often throughout his career, and although he wrote regularly during his career, particularly for New Statesman and Arts New York, his work appeared in later years.

Personal life

Patrick Heron, eldest child of Thomas Milner Heron and Eulalie Mabel (née Davies), was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, on January 30. When Patrick Heron was five years old and his brother Michael (later known as Dom Benedict) was four, the family moved to Cornwall, where Tom joined Alec Walker in Cryséde to manage and expand the company from artist-designed woodblock prints on silk to garment-making and retail. The whole family, now four children (Joanna was born 1926 and Antony Giles was born 1928), moved to Welwyn Garden City, where Tom founded Cresta Silks in 1929. Edward McKnight Kauffer and Wells Coates, Paul Nash, and Cedric Morris all worked with Cresta, although Patrick created fabric designs for the company from his teenage years. Patrick Heron met his future wife, Delia, daughter of Celia and Richard Reiss, a director of Welwyn Garden City, while still attending school.

Heron served as an agricultural labourer in Cambridgeshire before being arrested for insufficient health. In 1944–45, he returned to Cornwall to work for Bernard Leach at the Leach Pottery, St Ives. During this period, he met many well-known artists of the St Ives School, including Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. After Heron's purchase and renovation of Eagles Nest, a house he lived in during his childhood, he was reacquainted with Cornwall. He lived here the remainder of his life before he died at home in March 1999.

Patrick and Delia were married in 1945 and had two children: architect and educator Katharine (1947) and sculptor Susanna (1949).

Heron was elected a CBE in 1977 under Harold Wilson, but under Margaret Thatcher, she refused to be knighted.

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Career as a painter

Heron's early works were strongly influenced by artists such as Matisse, Bonnard, Braque, and Cézanne. Heron's work in various media outlets over his career, from the silk scarves he created for his father's company Cresta from the age of 14, to a Tate St Ives stained-glass window, but he was best known as a painter working in oils and gouache.

Heron first saw the paintings of Cézanne at a show at the National Gallery in 1933, an influence that stayed with him throughout his career. Heron completed The Piano, which he considered to be his first mature work after seeing The Red Studio by Matisse (one of his other significant influences) at the Redfern Gallery in 1943. In 1947 at the Redfern Gallery in London, his first solo exhibition was held. Heron began a series of portraits of T. S. Eliot in 1966, one of which was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1966. This highly abstracted portrait was the center of an exhibition at the gallery in 2013, on view for the first time alongside a collection of Heron's original studies from life and memory from which it was exhibited.

Heron's permanent move to Eagles Nest in 1956 coincided with his non-figurative painting dedication, resulting in a productive period of his art. Heron's roots can be seen in the Space in Colour exhibition held at Hanover Gallery, London, in 1953, where the works of his British contemporaries were on view, which he both curated and wrote the catalogue for. In the Tate collection, his Tachiste paintings referred to the garden at Eagles Nest, such as Azalea Garden.

Alan Bowness' 'Stripe' paintings, which were characterized by him as being "suffused with light and colour and full of a joyful life-enhancing quality that was so free and so refreshing," emphasized this shift toward the principles of color. Bowness continued to write in 1968 how he could'believe of no more disconcerting paintings in the last two years than Heron's stripe paintings from 1957.' Heron outlined how the Tachiste paintings' "vertical touch" were brought to an end, as the lines "became longer and longer" until the strokes came to a stoppage in early 1956. Heron was represented by Waddington Galleries in London from 1958 to 1960, and the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York in New York was also represented in the 1960s. Heron took over his studio at Porthmeor Studios in 1958, overlooking the beach at Porthmeor, St Ives, and profiting from the larger space to paint at a larger scale. The Tate took place in 1969.

Heron did not do much painting for a long time after Delia's unexpected death in 1979. When he returned to the canvas, he went to Eagles Nest's garden. Heron found a way to reimagine his artistic vision when he first moved to Japan in the 1950s: rather than dripping large shapes in pen across the canvas, which would later be filled in with a fine Japanese watercolour brush, rather than painting from the arm rather than the wrist, allowing the paintings to develop through the act of painting. This sparked of ingenuity, resulting in paintings such as 28 January: 1983 (Mimosa), which was the inspiration for Heron's Barbican exhibition of 1985.

Heron was invited to residence at the Museum of New South Wales in Sydney in 1989, and this culminated in another prolific period of his career. Heron created six large paintings and 46 gouaches in sixteen weeks, drawing inspiration from his daily stroll to his studio through the city's Botanic Gardens, located by the harbour. These works are reactions to real physical appearances, but not necessarily representations; rather, the line and colour encapsulate "specific visual realities without ever depicting them."

Heron's later career was marked by these intense periods of activity, as shown by his shows in the Barbican and another at the Camden Arts Centre in 1994. Heron created a series of paintings of grand proportions, ranging from 11 to 17 inches (3.35 to 5.18 m) long, utilizing the Camden Arts Centre's galleries in mind. These works were part of the exhibition titled 'Big Paintings' that went on to tour the United Kingdom. Heron designed a coloured glass window for the new Tate St Ives with his son-in-law Julian Feary, which opened in 1993. Heron was contracted to paint a portrait of author AS Byatt (1997), and the Tate Gallery in London held a major retrospective of his work in 1998. This was the largest retrospective display of Heron's work, bringing together pieces from the different decades and times of his working life. The works were on display at David Sylvester's late paintings exhibition, showing how the elements on which Heron's career was based were still in place. Nicholas Serota, the Tate Gallery's former director, who served as both a critic and a patron, referred to Heron as "one of the most influential figures in post-war British art."

Heron embarked on a series of 100 gouache paintings, none larger than the A4 in London, after the exhibition ended. He stopped at 43 years old, the number that it took to cover the carpet in his sitting room at Eagles Nest.

Career as a critic

Heron was both acclaimed as a writer and as an artist, and his contemporaries were lauded for his ability to express art from the perspective of a practitioner. When he was invited by Philip Mairet, editor of The New English Weekly, to contribute to the journal, he began writing about art in 1945. When Heron was still at Leach Pottery, his first published article on Ben Nicholson was published. Essays on Picasso, Klee, Cézanne, and Braque followed this. Heron began hosting a series of talks on contemporary art on the BBC World Service and the newly launched Third programme in the next two years, and she also wrote often for New Statesman. He was born in 1955 and was sent to Arts Digest, New York (later renamed Arts(NY)), and Routledge's The Changing Forms of Art collected his comment in the same year. Heron said he wanted to be a painter who wrote, not a writer who paints, in 1958, giving up his regular columns as a writer.

He did continue to contribute to exhibition catalogs and authored several key journals. Notably, he published a series of articles in Studio International in 1966, 1968, and 1970 criticizing American artists' apparent ascension, despite the expense of British and Parisian artists. In October 1974, his last essay on the subject appeared in a closely worded article of 14,000 words published in The Guardian for a period of three days. He also wrote a vociferously in favour of the English Art Schools' autonomy and autonomy against their integration into the polytechnic system. Heron's articles and essays have been republished in collections including "Selected Writings by the Artist" in Patrick Heron (Oxford: 1988), Patrick Heron on Art and Education (Leeds: 1996), and The Colour of Colour (Texas: 1979).

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