Blue & Deep Violet with Orange Brown & Green

Location

Country: Luxembourg
City: Luxembourg
Place: British Embassy

The circular spaces in this work look as if they have been cut out from scraps of orange, blue and brown pieces of paper; like a collage. Each of these ‘cut-outs’ appear as if they are set against a rich background of deep violet. In actual fact though, this work is a screen-print which Patrick Heron has created by contrasting colours and forms against each other. The work’s sense of colour and its rhythmic arrangement of shapes – seems almost as if Heron has transformed a piece of jazz music into a visual composition. Heron considered colour to be a key subject of his art, a view he often expressed. Speaking in 1958, he said: 'My main interest, in my painting, has always been in colour, space and light.’ Colour, ‘…is both the subject and the means; the form, and the content, the image and the meaning in my painting'. His works became increasingly abstract, after he moved to Cornwall in 1956 and his understanding of colour in creating the illusion of three-dimensional space on a flat canvas, became a key part of his artistic practice.

Patrick Heron was born in Leeds and studied at the Slade School of Art in London from 1937-39. During the 2nd World War he was an assistant at the Bernard Leach pottery in St Ives, where he met Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. From 1953-56 he taught at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. Until 1955 he worked in a figurative style derived from Matisse, painting still life and interiors with bright colours and complex spatial relationships. His conversion to pure abstraction in 1956 coincided with his move to Eagle’s Nest, Zennor, near St Ives in Cornwall, where he lived and worked until his death. Heron was appointed a CBE in 1977 and was a trustee of the Tate from 1980 until 1987. A major retrospective of his work was held at the Tate in 1998 and his work can be found in international collections including Tate; the Arts Council Collection; and the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh.

Places

Subjects

abstract, St. Ives School

Materials & Techniques

screenprint

Artist

Patrick Heron (1920 - 1999)

Title

Blue & Deep Violet with Orange Brown & Green

Edition

47/100

Date

1970

Medium

Screenprint

Acquisition

Purchased from Leslie Waddington Prints Ltd, December 1974

Inscription

below image: 47/100 / Patrick Heron 70

GAC number

11787