Footnotes

Provenance
With The Waddington Galleries, London
Ms. Vivien Gough-Cooper

Painted in April of 1966 Three Cadmiums, Five Discs is an early example of, as the artist referred to them, the 'wobbly hard-edge' paintings. These abstract meditations of composition and colour interaction, defined by the absolute edges between colour plains, were the central component of the artist's practice for more than a decade. Mel Gooding, partly employing the language of James Joyce, remarks that 'These paintings are among Herons most exuberantly playful; they are, above all, expressions of delight in the ineluctable modalities of the visible' (Mel Gooding, Patrick Heron, Phaidon, London, 1994, p.185)

Heron's work from this period owes its heritage to the post-war American Colour Field and Abstract Expressionist painters that he had been such a keen advocate of throughout the 1950s. These artists, such as Mark Rothko, Kenneth Nolan and Jackson Pollock, had rapidly become the dominant and accepted greats but in 1965, a year prior to the execution of the present work, Heron spoke out publically for the first time against what he now saw as an American hold over art. He felt this was becoming chauvinistic, overly academic and especially arid in its approach to craft which he stated was 'clinically impersonal, literally dead flat in quality' (op.cit, p.188). He was insistent that his work, and indeed British painting in general, must not succumb to such pitfalls. This initiative manifested itself in the 'wobbly hard-edge' paintings. In these works Heron would, in just a matter of purposeful seconds, mark out with charcoal the frontiers between each intended colour area, then laboriously apply the considered and uniformly flat colour in oil with a small Chinese watercolour brush in order to compose 'asymmetrical, unequal, disparate formal ingredients into a state of architectonic harmony' (loc.cit).

The harmony of this particular composition masterfully rests on just three tones; deep red, red and orange cadmium. This is a combination that Heron returned to after the completion of similar works of the same year namely Three Cadmiums: January-April (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven) and Three Cadmiums, Four Discs (Government Art Collection). The present work comes from the estate of Vivien Gough-Cooper, a director of the Richard Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh from 1966. The gallery, under the guidance of Demarco and with the support of Gough-Cooper, represented artists such as Joseph Beuys and Marina Abramović and was also responsible for introducing much early performance art to Scotland. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Vivien Gough-Cooper assembled an extensive and bold collection of some of Britain's foremost practitioners of visual art.