Patrick Heron

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Patrick Heron bigraphy, stories - English artist

Patrick Heron : biography

30 January 1920 – 20 March 1999

Patrick Heron (30 January 1920 – 20 March 1999)Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article by Mel Gooding, ‘Heron, Patrick (1920–1999)’, accessed 1 Feb 2007 was an English painter, writer and designer, based in St. Ives, Cornwall.

Becoming a painter

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 in 1944–45, where he met Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and many other leading artists of the St Ives School.Checkland, Sarah Jane, "Ben Nicholson", 2000, John Murray. ISBN 978-0719554568 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.Gooding, Mel, Patrick Heron, 1993, Phaidon Press. ISBN 0-7148-3444-0.

Early influences

The George Braque exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1946 deeply impressed him and he wrote an essay on Braque for The New English Weekly. Then up to 1953 he spent time in Europe visiting Paris, Provence and Italy. Heron visited Braque in his Paris studio and presented him with the New English Weekly article. His first one-man exhibition was at the Redfern Gallery in London in 1947. In 1953 he organised, wrote the catalogue and exhibited in Space in Colour,Space in Colour, Hanover Gallery, 1953 (catalogue to the exhibition) an exhibition of ten contemporary artists, at Hanover Gallery, London. Following this he exhibited twelve paintings at the Il Bienal di São Paulo, Brazil. The same year he began teaching at Central School of Arts and Crafts in London and continued there until 1956. In 1956 he saw, and praised highly the American Abstract Expressionists who showed their work for the first time in England at the Tate Gallery. He was inspired by this group of eight painters, their confidence and the large scale and flatness.

A development towards abstraction had been evident in his paintings, for example, Square Leaves (1952) and Winter Harbour (1955) The effect on Heron of the New York painters, together with his move to live at Eagles Nest, overlooking the cliffs at Zennor, that year was a pivotal point in the transformation into his now characteristic language of interlinking forms; his balancing of colour and space. Heron’s deepest influences were Braque, Matisse and Bonnard and he was connected first of all to the pure abstraction of European lineage, represented by Naum Gabo and Pierre Soulages.

"Heron used that most rare and uncanny of gifts: the ability to invent an imagery that was unmistakenly his own, and yet which connects immediately with the natural world as we perceive it, and transforms our vision of it. Like those of his acknowledged masters, Braque, Matisse and Bonnard, his paintings are at once evocations and celebrations of the visible, discoveries of what he called ‘the reality of the eye’ ".

Public works and collaborations

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.Tooby, Michael and Feary, Julian. "Colour in Space, Patrick Heron: public projects", Tate Gallery St.Ives. ISBN 1-85437-297-1

Photographs of Patrick Heron

The wrong portrait of Patrick Heron was published in Adrian Clark’s book (British and Irish Art 1945-1951: From War to Festival, Hogarth Arts, 2010).the British art blog: Patrick Heron? Which Patrick Heron?http://robinsimononart.blogspot.com/2010/09/patrick-heron-which-patrick-heron.html" Portraits of the artist Patrick Heron can be found at the National Portrait Gallery.