Patrick Heron

(British, 1920-1999)

BLUE AND BLACK (3 CIRCLES) : JANUARY 1962 40.5 x 50.8 cm. (16 x 20 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
With Waddington Galleries, London, April 1962, where acquired by
T.W. (Fello) Atkinson, thence by descent to the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Heron's painting of the first half of the 1960s can be characterised by an increasingly apparent simplification of composition that plays into a complexity of how colour, shape and mark effect the ways space can be read in each work. A few years earlier, with paintings such as BROWN GROUND (WITH SOFT RED AND GREEN) : AUGUST 1958-JULY 1959 (Tate) the feeling of spatial equality – where there is no hierarchy between the largest colour area and any other shape – is achieved through painting and over-painting as he later described: 'The shape of colour, at this moment in my painting, was something I arrived at by allowing differing quantities of colour, of the liquid pigment itself, to expand and contract, to swim with or against one another under the tutelage of a swiftly moving soft blunt brush, nudging, scribbling, gliding, pushing or pulling the paint across the surface' (Patrick Heron, 'The Shape of Colour', Studio International, February 1974, p.71). The fact that the painting is not designed or drawn but the result of an "active brush gives a charge to the painted surface so that the largest colour area is not a passive receptor or ground for other shapes. This activity of painting stimulated the appearance of a vocabulary of shape – organic, ragged lopsided discs, squares, and lozenges.

With BLUE AND BLACK (3 CIRCLES) : JANUARY 1962 this vocabulary of shape formed through the 'active brush' has been adapted to minimise over-painting as can be seen in the differently weighted brushstrokes that define the blue and black colour areas. The density of medium allows the white primed surface of the canvas to be apparent. The three circles of the title are then described individually: by a decisive scratched line in the blue colour area to reveal white priming more directly, and within the black upright oblong: the upper disc defined by the handling of the thicker over-paint and also by the line partially scratched through the paint layers, the lower disc of blue revealed through (or on) the black shape. This painting, made up effectively of two colours and pared down shapes, becomes a celebration of the rich possibilities of painted colour to reveal spatial complexity.

We are grateful to Dr Andrew Wilson for compiling this catalogue entry.

The Patrick Heron Trust is in the process of researching the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work and would like to hear from owners of any works by Patrick Heron, so that these can be included in this comprehensive catalogue. Please write to the Patrick Heron Trust, c/o Modern British and Irish Art, Bonhams, 101 New Bond Street, London W1S 1SR or email [email protected].