Patrick Heron
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Patrick Heron (30 January 1920 – 20 March 1999), was an English
painter, writer and designer, based in St. Ives, Cornwall. Born at Headingley, Leeds in Yorkshire in 1920, he was the son of Thomas Milner Heron and Eulalie 'Jack' Heron (née Davies), the first of four children (Michael, Joanna and Giles). His father was a clothes manufacturer, pacifist, socialist and leading member of the Leeds Arts Club. In 1925 the Heron family moved to West Cornwall where T M Heron took over the running of Crysede and four years later the family moved to Welwyn Garden City where Tom founded the firm Cresta Silks and was to become the original mind behind Utility Clothing during the war. It was here at his new school that Patrick Heron met his future wife Delia Reiss, daughter of Celia and Dick Reiss, co-founder of Welwyn Garden City. He attended St. George's School in Harpenden and on a school visit to the National Gallery, London in 1933 saw paintings by Paul Cézanne for the first time. He immediately began to paint in a Cézanne-influenced style. Shortly after this he was asked to make designs for Cresta Silks and continued to design for Cresta until 1951. When he was 17 he attended The Slade School of Art for two days a week, returning to the West Country to draw the landscape. In World War II he registered as a conscientious objector and worked as an agricultural labourer for three years, then at the Leach Pottery at St Ives between 1944-5, where he met Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and many other leading artists of the St Ives School. He had just seen Matisse's The Red Studio, exhibited at the Redfern Gallery, London and soon after this completed what he later considered to be his first mature work, The Piano in 1943. In 1947 Heron began a series of portraits of T.S.Eliot. The final cubist version, painted in 1949, was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1966. The summer of 1947 was spent in St.Ives (as were consecutive summers until 1956 when the family moved permanently from London to Cornwall) followed by first London exhibition at Redfern Gallery in October. Heron's writings were admired by American art critic Clement Greenberg who sought him out in London in 1954. The friendship they formed eventually disintegrated when they disagreed as judges of the John Moores Prize Exhibition in 1965. In April 1956 the family moved from London to Eagles Nest in west Cornwall, and in June he exhibited 'Tachiste Garden Paintings' at Redfern Gallery. The following year his first Stripe paintings were exhibited in a group exhibition at the Redfern Gallery 'Metavisual, Taschiste, Abstract'. Towards the end of the next decade Alan Bowness wrote: "I can think of few more disconcerting pictures shown in England in the last twenty years than Patrick Heron's striped paintings of 1957." With these canvases Heron found a route towards abstraction, not of a given motif, but instead formed from the formal balance achieved between the visual reality of what he saw in the garden at Eagles Nest and the pictorial reality of what he painted. The resulting paintings were executed at a remove from an idea of a representational subject and so freed Heron to deal directly with a pictorial reality. In 1958, he moved to Ben Nicholson’s former studio at Porthmeor, St Ives, and two years later he held his first exhibitions in New York at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery and at the newly arrived Waddington Galleries in London."The American critical response was enthusiastic and perceptive. Dennison, in Arts (April 1960) was struck by the subtlety and richness of his colour and ....He was able to discern a crucial distinction " Where Rothko arrives at an impersonal and yet lyrical grandeur, Heron develops a personal image.." ......For Stuart Preston of the new York Times, Heron was ' balancing [his specific, squarish shapes ] in compositions of momentary equilibrium. Their state of suspended animation gives his pictures their extraordinary lightness despite the positive existence of his forms.' He visited Australia in 1967 and 1973, exhibiting at the Bonython Gallery, Sydney. He delivered the Power lecture in Contemporary Art entitled The Shape of Colour.”He wrote ‘ There is no shape that is not conveyed to you by colour, and there is no colour that can present itself to you without involving shape. If there is no shape then the colour would be right across your retina’ “In 1978 he delivered the William Doty Lectures in Fine Arts at University of Texas in Austin entitled 'The Colour of Colour' coinciding with a presentation of over 30 large canvasses from the previous twelve years This was the culmination of the ‘wobbly hard-edge’ period, works filled with intense fields of unadulterated colour and spatial brushwork. “.. with an immediacy of sensational impact ..only possible in the actual relation of spectator to painting” Delia died quite suddenly and unexpectedly at Eagles Nest in 1979. For some years Patrick was unable to paint. He returned to drawing and slowly a foundation for the later Garden paintings emerged. In 1989 he returned to Sydney as artist in residence at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Over a period of 16 weeks he produced six large paintings and forty six gouaches creating "...the final great breakout into the freely executed paintings inspired by his new acquaintance with the Botanical Gardens of Sydney and, once more, his abiding love, the garden at Eagles Nest." In 1994 his Exhibition "Big Paintings" was held at Camden Arts Centre. Heron's largest and most ambitious paintings were 15–22 ft long. "One major change that came about in Heron’s painting as a result of his time in Sydney, was a greater awareness of the white primed canvas as a colour space in its own right. ..the Sydney Garden Paintings gave Heron the licence to create works that were seemingly quickly wrought and sparsley painted- which even appear at first to be incomplete or negligent. Ones expectations of what should be are affronted. Nevertheless, this reaction belies a complexity that the artist worked through in his last paintings..and reached a highpoint..in 1998” "His last paintings were full-on, risky, filled with bright squiggles, painterly flurries and cartoon doodles. They should have been chaotic and absurd, but they were instead open and vital, eye-rocking and beautiful. Heron's retrospective was ravishing, and had the vitality of a much younger artist. He continued painting until the day before he died. He died peacefully at his home in Zennor, Cornwall, in March 1999 at the age of 79. He was survived by both his daughters, Katharine Heron, now an architect and Susanna Heron, a sculptor. On 24 May 2004, the Momart warehouse fire destroyed a number of Heron’s most important works. Patrick heron's paintings are in public collections worldwide. Heron won the Grand Prize at the John Moores Prize Exhibition in Liverpool in 1959 and the silver medal at the São Paulo Art Biennial in 1965. In 1978 Patrick and Delia Heron were made Honorary Citizens of Texas by Order of the Secretary of State. He was awarded an Hon. D.Litt. in 1982 by the University of Exeter and in 1986 an Hon. D.Litt.by the University of Kent at Canterbury, by Chancellor Jo Grimond whose portrait he had painted for The Scottish National Portrait Gallery. In 1987 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Royal College of Art and In 1989 he was made an honorary Ph.D., CNAA by Winchester School of Art, in 1992 an Honorary Fellow of RIBA and in 1996 an Honorary Fellow of Bretton Hall, University of Leeds. He turned down a Knighthood under Margaret Thatcher and declined to become an RA. He was a Trustee of the Tate Gallery between 1980-198777 Patrick Heron made several Public Works, in 1992 he designed the coloured glass window for Tate St.Ives and in 1996 a site specific outdoor installation at Stag Place 'Big Painting Sculpture' in collaboration with his son in law Julian Feary of Feary and Heron Architects Several Patrick Heron pieces can be viewed at the Tate, St Ives. |