Patrick Heron

Patrick Heron (b. 1920) is one of the leading British artists of his generation, and an important figure in the development of post-war abstract art. Working and living in Cornwall for most of his creative life, he has been closely associated with the St Ives artists including Ben Nicholson, William Scott and Roger Hilton. Above all, Heron has been obsessed by colour and light, and in a long succession of beautiful paintings he has pursued his vision of an art that would reclaim as its true subject 'the reality of the eye'. This book is the first to examine in detail the progress of Heron's career and to set it in the context of his life and times.

Publishers Weekly

British artist Heron's paintings, drenched in light and color, confirm him as a colorist of genius and an original who resists categorization. Born in 1920 and residing mostly in Celtic Cornwall since 1956, Heron turned to abstraction in the mid-1950s, with a purely sensuous apprehension of color, space and shape that recalls his idols Matisse, Bonnard and Braque, yet he has restlessly experimented in his own idioms. His juicy biomorphic compositions of the past 16 years shimmer with atmospheric pyrotechnics yet are amazingly relaxed, even serene. In the 1970s he unreeled oceanic stretches of color, seeking what he called a ``full emptiness.'' His joyfully anarchic '60s canvases, featuring orbs, discs and squares that collide, nudge, hover, envelop or invade, invite the eye and the mind to play. In this stunningly illustrated monograph, art critic Gooding sensitively explores a dynamic body of work unfamiliar to most American art lovers. (Nov.)