Patrick Heron - Later Life

Later Life

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.His daughter Katharine was born early in 1947, followed by Susanna in 1949. 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 his 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' (exhibition title invented by Delia Heron). 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."

"Heron's Garden Paintings of 1956 mark a singular achievement within British Art of the period. 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 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 canvases 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”.

On the same visit Patrick and Delia Heron were made honorary citizens of Texas by order of the Secretary of State.

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 (see ‘Red Garden Painting : June 3–5, 1985’ illustrated above, completed in time for the retrospective at the Barbican the same year).

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, on 20 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.