Patrick Heron 1920-1999
Alizarine Painting (Orange and Blue): May 1961, 1961
oil on canvas
48 x 60 ins
signed titled and dated verso

Provenance
The Artist
Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York
Rutland Gallery, London
Waddington Galleries, London
Rolls Royce Plc

Exhibited
Bertha Shaefer Gallery, New York, Patrick Heron, April 1962
Barbican Art Gallery, London, Patrick Heron, 11th July - 1st September 1985

Literature
Mel Gooding, Patrick Heron, Phaidon, London, 1994, p162, illustrated p165
Barbican Art Gallery, Patrick Heron, London, 1985, cat no.36 illustrated p33



Patrick Heron’s paintings from the period 1959-1962 are mostly soft and atmospheric in treatment with a few blurred edged discs or squares (sometimes positive sometimes shadowy) floating in a ground of a contrasting colour. The colour areas vary greatly in density and luminosity so that, for example, the discs sometimes have more body than the surrounding area (like islands in a sea), and sometimes less (like water surrounded by land), while broken colours are played off against vibrant pure ones, transparent colours against opaque areas and so on. The colours are treated lyrically with a musical freedom. This experimentation is pushed in certain works to the point where a ding-dong relationship is established between two shapes on opposite sides of the picture, so that the eye is drawn first to one and then to the other, or else a coloured area is made to pulsate, to expand or contract (a kind of optical flicker involving after-images).

Although Heron’s admiration for the paintings of the New York Abstract Expressionists was in some way reinforced by the exhibition of The New American Painting held at the Tate Gallery in Spring 1959, his attitude towards American painting had already started to become somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand, his paintings after 1959 were much more simplified and empty, sometimes containing only two or three very simple areas surrounded by a ground of contrasting colour. But on the other hand he had begun to feel that his interests were radically different from those of the Americans. Whereas the Americans liked symmetry, he always chose a marked asymmetry, an irregular balance, even to the point of pushing all his shapes right to one side of the picture; and whereas the Americans tended to repeat a compositional schema, Heron was always searching for new variations.