Heron, Patrick (1920-1999), was a British painter, critic, art teacher, and lecturer. He was regarded by many as one of the great abstract artists of the 1900’s. He was best known for his large, exuberant, colorful abstract works. His paintings typically consist of simple bars of oil paint, decorative shapes such as rectangles that emphasize contrasting saturated colors, or large surfaces of color. Many of his pictures hint at landscape themes.
Heron was influenced by the French painters Paul Cezanne and Henri Matisse in his optimistic early works immediately after World War II (1939-1945), mostly still life paintings. Later his work became more abstract and exploited the use of color. Up to the 1990’s, Heron continued to produce abstract works, with naturalistic elements in them. From 1947, Heron’s work was shown in more than 60 one-man exhibitions in major cities throughout Europe, Australia, and North and South America. His paintings were also the subject of several major retrospective shows staged in major art galleries of the world. Heron also won a number of art prizes, such as the John Moores prize in Liverpool, in 1959. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Royal College of Art in London in 1987. In the early 1990’s, he was commissioned to design a huge stained glass window for the new Tate Gallery that opened in St. Ives, Cornwall, in 1993.
Heron was born on Jan. 30, 1920, in Leeds, Yorkshire, the son of a blouse manufacturer who was also active in socialist politics. When he was 5 years old, his family moved to Cornwall and stayed there for four years before moving to Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire. In Cornwall, Heron first learned to paint and draw and showed great talent. The experience of spending his first school days in Cornwall made a deep impression on him, and in 1955, he moved back to Cornwall. He bought “Eagle’s Nest,” an austere Victorian house in which he and his parents had lived for a year from 1927 to 1928. It has a beautiful, inspiring location above Zennor, a village near St. Ives on the Atlantic coast. The clarity of the light and the beauty of the Cornish landscape are said to have increased Heron’s awareness of color, which is an important feature of his paintings.
After studying at the Slade School of Art in London, Heron worked as an art critic on the New English Weekly (1945-1947). He later wrote for the New Statesman and was the London correspondent for a New York arts periodical. Noted for being a tough, outspoken critic, he produced many articles on art for newspapers and magazines and a number of books, including Vlaminck Paintings: 1900-45 (1947), The Changing Forms of Art (1955), Braque (1958), The Shapes of Colour 1943-78 (1978), and The Colour of Colour (1979). The Paintings of Patrick Heron 1965-77 was published in 1978 and Patrick Heron, edited by Vivien Knight, was published in 1988. Heron’s writing about the St. Ives group of artists working in the 1950’s and 1960’s helped draw public attention to the importance of their work. Heron was a trustee of the Tate Gallery, London, from 1980 to 1987. Heron was also a teacher and lecturer, holding posts at the Central Schools of Arts and Crafts in London (1953-1955), the University of Sydney (1973), and the University of Texas at Austin (1978). Heron died on March 25, 1999.
