29 Facts About Patrick Heron

Patrick Heron was a British abstract and figurative artist, critic, writer, and polemicist, who lived in Zennor, Cornwall.

Patrick Heron's artworks are most noted for his exploration and use of colour and light.

Patrick Heron is known for both his early figurative work and non-figurative works, which over the years looked to explore further the idea of making all areas of the painting of equal importance.

Patrick Heron's work was exhibited widely throughout his career and while he wrote regularly early in his career, notably for New Statesman and Arts New York, this continued periodically in later years.

When Patrick Heron was five and his brother Michael was 4 the family moved to Cornwall, where Tom joined Alec Walker at Crysede to manage and expand the business from artist-designed woodblock prints on silk to include garment-making and retail.

Notable designers including Edward McKnight Kauffer and Wells Coates, Paul Nash and Cedric Morris worked with Cresta, and Patrick Heron created fabric designs for the firm from his teenage years.

At school, Patrick Heron met his future wife, Delia, daughter of Celia and Richard Reiss, a director of the company which founded Welwyn Garden City.

Patrick Heron spent the rest of his life here, until he died at home in March 1999.

Patrick Heron was appointed a CBE in 1977 under Harold Wilson, but rejected a knighthood under Margaret Thatcher.

Patrick Heron used that most rare and uncanny of gifts: the ability to invent an imagery that was unmistakably his own, and yet which connects immediately with the natural world as we perceive it, and transforms our vision of it.

Patrick Heron first saw the paintings of Cezanne at an exhibition at the National Gallery in 1933, an influence which continued throughout his career.

That same year, Heron began a series of portraits of T S Eliot, one of which was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1966.

Patrick Heron's permanent move to Eagles Nest above the Cornish village of Zennor in 1956 coincided with his commitment to non-figurative painting and resulted in a very productive period of his work.

Patrick Heron described how the 'vertical touch' of the Tachiste paintings were pushed to the ultimate conclusion, as the lines "became longer and longer, until on one painting in early 1956 they became so long that the strokes touched top and bottom".

From 1958 onwards, Patrick Heron was represented by Waddington Galleries in London, and in the 1960s he was represented by the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York.

Patrick Heron won the John Moores Painting Prize in 1959 with Black Painting, Red, Brown and Olive, 1959.

The shock of Delia's unexpected death in 1979 meant Patrick Heron did little painting for some time.

In 1989 Patrick Heron was invited to be artist-in-residence at the museum of New South Wales in Sydney, and this resulted in another highly prolific period of his work.

The year before, Patrick Heron designed a coloured glass window for the new Tate St Ives with his son-in-law Julian Feary, which opened in 1993.

Patrick Heron was commissioned to paint a portrait of author AS Byatt, and the following year Tate Gallery, London staged a major retrospective of his work in 1998.

Once the exhibition closed, at the Tate Gallery, London, Patrick Heron embarked on a series of 100 gouache paintings, each no bigger than A4.

Patrick Heron stopped at 43rd, the number it took to cover the carpet in his sitting room at Eagles Nest.

Dear Mr Patrick Heron, I have translated certain sections of your book on paintings which I have read with interest.

Patrick Heron was highly acclaimed as a writer as well as an artist, and respected by his contemporaries for being able to articulate art from the perspective of a practitioner.

Patrick Heron's writing about art began in 1945 when he was invited by Philip Mairet, editor of The New English Weekly, to contribute to the journal.

Patrick Heron's first published article, on Ben Nicholson, was written while Heron was still at Leach Pottery.

In 1958, Patrick Heron took a "vow of silence" as a critic, giving up his regular columns as he said he wanted to be a painter who wrote, not a writer who paints.

Patrick Heron did continue to contribute to exhibition catalogues, and wrote some key articles.

Patrick Heron wrote passionately in defence of the independence and autonomy of English Art Schools against their integration into the polytechnic system.