Footnotes

Provenance
With Waddington, Galleries, London
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
St Ives, Tate Gallery,Patrick Heron: Early and Late Garden Paintings, 20 March-3 June 2001

Literature
Andrew Wilson,Patrick Heron: Early and Late Garden Paintings, Tate Publishing, London, 2001, p.27 (ill.)
Mel Gooding,Patrick Heron, Phaidon Press, London, 2002, p.106 (col.ill.)


White and Green Upright: August 1956 is a painting that belongs to a key moment in both Patrick Heron's life and the development of British art. In April 1956, just a few months before the present work was painted, the artist and his family settled at Eagle's Nest, the home he purchased from Mark Arnold-Forster. It was here, in close proximity to his friend and fellow artist Bryan Wynter and five miles west of the artists' colony of St Ives, amongst the hills overlooking the Cornish village of Zennor, that Heron found his idyll. This corner of west Penwith had captivated numerous people before, including D.H. Lawrence who wrote 'When I looked down at Zennor, I knew it was the Promised Land, and that a new heaven and a new earth would take place' (James T. Boulton (ed.), The Selected Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Cambridge, 1997, p.123).

In January 1956 Modern Art in the United States arrived on British shores and caused a sensation at the Tate. Heron reviewed the exhibition, which included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning amongst others, for Arts and there can be little doubt it had a revelatory impact on both him and his peers. The scale of the works and the confidence with which they were composed meant he was 'instantly elated by the size, originality, economy and inventive daring of many of the paintings'. However, as an accomplished artist himself, Heron was confident enough to stress his view that there was a lack of resonance in their colour. This is perhaps not surprising given his grounding in European art, shaped by the formalist criticism of Roger Fry alongside the work of great Cubists and Fauves, their canvases imbued with vivid hues. He was also a keen admirer of another American artist, Sam Francis, who as a Tachiste alongside the likes of Hans Hartung and Pierre Soulages advocated gestural painting of a softer kind than Abstract Expressionism.

The arrival at Eagle's Nest in 1956 marked a move away from figuration and the embracement of abstraction as Heron saw it. The property had been described as a 'painter's garden' owing to the spectacular planting undertaken by Arnold-Forster during his prior ownership and Heron clearly felt this to be the case with much of his work from the period drawing on the rich outdoor landscape and his own reference to 'Tachiste Garden Paintings'. White and Green Upright: August 1956 predominantly incorporates the colour scheme of its title in vertical planes across the surface with subtle tones and variations of red, yellow and black also introduced to give layered complexity. We may consider the ocean to also be at play here with Heron describing how it acted as a gigantic mirror around the property, 'brilliantly silver, and reflecting white light upwards. To have the rocks and the bushes illuminated from below, from a glittering reflector which is over 600 feet beneath one, and many miles wide – is a special experience' (Patrick Heron quoted in Michael McNay, Patrick Heron, Tate Publishing, London, 2002, p.38).