Patrick Heron

Heron’s practice became purely abstract from the 1950s onwards. During this time, he began to create strikingly bright oil and gouache works, with a focus on the visual properties of colour and their interaction to one another. Coined ‘wobbly hard edge’ paintings by Heron, he painted these works with deliberately flat planes of contrasting or harmonising colour, giving each hue a clearly defined edge and form. Intentionally abstract in their nature, these shapes seek to illustrate just how each colour affects the other depending on its placement. The present work wonderfully explores this concept. Working exclusively in tones of blue, the central darker element immediately highlights two lighter blue discs set within, seemingly lifting them out from the surface. At the same time to the left, a third disc has been painted. Contained however inside its wider matching light blue form, the impact of this shape is much more subdued, seen only by the rounded brushstrokes on the page. Heron comments on this, stating ‘It is in this interaction between differing colours that our full awareness of any of them lies. So the meeting-lines between areas of colour are utterly crucial to our appreciation of the actual hue of those areas' (P. Heron quoted in M. Gooding, Patrick Heron, London, 1994, p. 186).