Painter and writer, born in Leeds, son of T.M. Heron, founder of Cresta Silks. He learned to paint before attending the Slade School (1937–39), and was by then already familiar with the work of such French painters as Bonnard and Matisse. Designs which he made for his father’s silk business in the mid-1930s show him conversant with contemporary French design styles. In the Second World War, as a conscientious objector, he worked on the land, but also spent time in the Cornish pottery workshop of Bernard Leach. In the work which he produced after the war, the predominant influence was still French, most particularly that of Georges Braque. He had his first one-man show at the Redfern Gallery in 1947, and between 1953 and 1956 taught at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. As a contributor of articles to New English Weekly, New Statesman and Arts, Heron gave an articulate account of contemporary trends in the arts, especially from 1956, when his interest was engaged by the work of the American abstract expressionists. He himself now moved in the direction of abstraction with his garden series and his strip paintings. Inspiration throughout came from the surroundings of the Cornish home, Eagle’s Nest, which he had known since boyhood, and into which he and his wife moved in 1955. After his wife’s death, in the 1980s and 1990s, Heron’s colour fields ceased to fill his canvases. He reintroduced an element of drawing, even of representation, leaving sometimes considerable areas of primed canvas uncoloured. With his architect son-in-law, Julian Feary, Heron designed the winning entry, Big Painting Sculpture, in a competition staged by the developers of Stag Place (now Cardinal Place), Westminster, for an artwork intended to form the new piazza’s gateway; it was unveiled in December 1998. The Tate Gallery staged a major retrospective of Heron’s work in the same year.
Bibliography: M. Gooding, Patrick Heron, London, 1994; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 16–17.
Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011