Patrick Heron

Waddington Galleries, London
Dr and Mrs N. Hawkins, Sydney; purchased from the above

This work is not in a frame. There is some minor wear to the corners. The work has its original stretcher and is not lined. There is some very fine cracking in the blue paint most noticeable in the lower left hand corner and intermittently along the lower edge to the centre of the painting. There is a very minor vertical crease in the centre left hand side against stretcher bar. Generally there are probably a few and very light scuffs to the blue surface. There is some surface dirt most noticeable to the impasto areas of the paint but also a couple of spots in the blue.
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The English painter Patrick Heron had a close relationship with Australia. In 1967 he visited Perth to judge the Perth Festival painting prize, in 1973 he showed at Bonython Galleries, and while in Sydney presented 'The shape of colour', the 6th Power Lecture at the Institute of Fine Arts, and then in 1989-1990 he spent three months as artist-in residence at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. While the present work was painted in England, it certainly carries echoes of the Australian landscape in both its desert orange and brown and its deep Sydney Harbour blue.

Begun in the spring of 1978, the painting was evidently abandoned before completion. That year, following a visit to the United States, the artist became seriously ill with infected lungs and produced little, and this crisis was followed by a second: the sudden death of his wife Delia in May 1979. When Heron returned to full production in the early 1980s his work had undergone a subtle yet significant shift, and the present work exemplifies the paintings of the transitional period. The characteristic squashed or squarish circles of his earlier work have disappeared (temporarily at least), here replaced by curious, organic, multiply-curved ideograms, which suggest amoebas, kidneys, islands or jigsaw puzzle pieces. The innumerable small strokes which defined the colour areas in the 1970s 'wobbly hard-edge' paintings have given way to a broader, brushier surface treatment, and he introduces calligraphic reinforcements and interruptions, a 'linear painting-drawing (which) add(s) rhythmic accent to the interplay and counterpoint of colour areas.'¹  With its complex, almost ungainly structure of delicately-balanced colour-forms floating over and under a rich cerulean ground, the present work is a fine example of Heron's atmospheric, musical abstraction, presaging its free and final expression in the grand Garden paintings of the later 1980s.

1.  Mel Gooding, Patrick Heron, London: Phaidon, 1994, pp. 211, 228