Abstract Artist Pat Heron documentary

with an audience that is primarily weren't conscious which the English audience was and still is to some extent the expression of the thing in words immediately takes the prime place and so people they are his pinch like words because these are his ideas listen for how clearly he's expressing these pictorial factors now nothing could be more ridiculous you're asking me questions I can't ask these by saying nothing it's also I start to talk I could go through the rest of my life like really another word I write one novel every three years I read the newspaper what gives me my satisfaction and significance hello Patrick Harran is an artist who uses words as vividly as he uses paint his critical insights into modern British European and American painting well summarized thirty years ago in his book the changing forms of art which is still one of the most stimulating accounts of the modern movement that one who wished to read heron was born in Leeds in 1920 and he spent his life in the practice and service of modern art he won the first prize in the John Moore exhibition in Liverpool in 1959 he was awarded a CBE in 1977 and is currently a trustee of the Tate Gallery in London he's represented in over 30 public collections in Britain and has exhibited as far afield as Sydney New York Paris Montreal Toronto and Rio de Janeiro john reed who made this film not only gives us a portrait of the artist but also shows some of the realities behind the abstractions of a painter who's come to see his world entirely in terms of color [Music] in the summer of 1985 an impressive exhibition at the Barbican gallery in London showed 50 years of Patrick herons work it confirmed in many people's eyes his standing as one of the leading abstract painters working in Britain since the last war Heron has lived in the western tip of Cornwall for the last 30 years but his connection with the area goes back to his early childhood when his father managed the silk textile works at sand Ives Heron grew up in a family where the work of modern artists and craftsmen was taken for granted he took after his father in many ways he liked to live adventurously he campaigned against what he saw as a takeover of the arts by American promoters in the 60s he denounced this as cultural imperialism he protested against what he called the murder of the art schools when they were threatened by new government policies in the 70s he's always defended the absolute freedom and autonomy of art even now he believes that the visual arts in Britain are undervalued by a cultural establishment that has little idea of what's going on this all had its seat in it art schools but what has what have our establishment or our government done and particularly this government west of all just eating this thing away are they unaware of its importance I mean I'd like to ask the Prime Minister Kent could she compute whether the existence of Henry Moore is worth five trials because our bet it was that's what I like to ask her Heron was five years old when his parents moved to cold-war like any boy his age he drew ships and trains bikes and towns often he drew from memory with great accuracy some pictures were more imaginative and showed a sophisticated awareness of abstract elements as an adult he rarely drew or painted anything you're in a world of Veridian greens of a multitude of Gray's soft cerulean blue the stunted stubborn like an encrusted Church stars stand on the skylines signaling to each other as outposts of Christian security in a sliding pagan Celtic landscape [Music] one place in particular made a great impression on him even as a child it was a house aptly called eagle's nest perched on a cluster of granite boulders in splendid isolation 600 feet above the sea Katherine Mansfield and D H Lawrence both stayed nearby lawrence wrote his novel the rainbow in a cottage below eagles nest set in the strange and network of stone walls arranged in inh patterns formed two thousand years ago herons parents often visited the house to see it's remarkable owner Arnold Foster who created it around a unique garden filled with rare shrubs and flowers from all over the world in Foster's day the house had been a rather dark and gloomy place but Heron had always been attracted to it eventually 30 years after he first knew it he became its new owner when he settled in Cornwall in 1956 Herron and his wife Delia transformed it over the years into it Patrick Aaron's father Tom Heron seems to be in exactly the right kind of father for a child who was already an accomplished artist by the age of five I felt had a most amazing artistic intelligence he was astonishing where astonishingly avant-garde which is a term that meant something in those days I mean when he set up in business on his own at the age of 20 I think in Bradford he used to go that way incidentally grew up bearded me today because I thought it might make him look profit loss comparing when he was but he used to get down the hill time to London on business but also to go to the cafe royal where he was a friend of Epstein met Gautier Bradesco eat Windham Lewis all that gangly do you used to get out from Leeds to handle with his with his Leeds friends such as Frank Wright of the year director of the art gallery and the I think critical sound it's had even before the first war Tom Heron was buying abstract paintings from a totally unknown Leeds artist before I'd ever heard of the great Turner Turner to me he meant to in fact bruce turner who have been of his cubist painting this future futurists painting this this painting superimposing five images of poplar but dancing on stage at Lee's an amazing painting um these were the works on the wall on the floors that were rocked by Ethel Mary all the furniture had been made in Kendall by Arthur Simpson wonderful um stained oak furniture house was exciting full of colorful akela herons moved from sin dives to wall in Garden City in 1929 where his father started Christus silks employing the most advanced artists and designers of the day posters and packaging were by McKnight kalfa fabrics were designed by painters such as Paul Nash even Patrick Harran then only 14 in still at school was designing silk squares and scarves for the firm he did further designs for them a few years later very much influenced by the decorative qualities of Matisse both parents were proud of Patrick's artistic gifts they told his teachers to cut out the conventional stuff unli him to his own instincts one art teacher told his father well you can't teach a boy to paint but if he's got it in him you can help him to get it out by the age of 14 Heron was already working with considerable assurance his teenage paintings were already drawing a great deal of inspiration from artists as varied as Suzanne or Sicard he usually painted from memory with a sharp and retentive eye he discovered as much in art as in real life Bogey's bar painted when he was 17 already in parts suggested his completely abstract striped paintings which were to follow 20 years later his parents continued to support his precocious talent and tried to send him to the Slade School of Art in London well the Slade was a complete mistake because then I I actually you see I went to school where I was allowed into sixth formers and George's Harden without taking any levels or levels as they're called Hospital guy just bypass the whole lot I got that first thing I got out of his games so every Hoffman I went into this corrugated I'll where which was the it was the wood workshop and one or two of us were painting in there the man who ran it van der strasse was a brilliant an amazing man and he I mean he'd in a sense taught me nothing in fact I got into the Slade by putting all these painting a city says Annie paint him into the back of a car I'm going to see professor Schwab who said you better come along but I just come along for two days a week very arrogantly I'm sorry to say but I didn't enter any course and I left after yeah because it was completely total mistake there was nothing happening that what did happen of course was the Second World War and for the duration he did very little painting there was a strong pacifist tradition in his family going back as far as the Boer War their support of liberal and moral causes and made them used to conflict with Authority Heron was sent to work on the land well I mean I thought started guilty at not being in prison as a matter of fact and it isn't as though one didn't know what was involved in that particular war in July 39 I spent three weeks in Berlin that's the best man of an hour school offender was marrying a Jewish girl in Berlin and they were going to fly out I mean I therefore witnessed for Gaston us of that dictatorship that is a very high but I think people do they have completely forgotten what the pacifist position is about it's not taken in ignorance of what ah but I mean Gandhi after all got rid of the British by nan burns under anyway we weren't too intimate but I was forced by the whole of my sort of family feelings to do this and of course there wasn't there was a conflict in my life then because this cut right across was decided to get right on with one's painting I wish I told you I'd never any doubt what I came to be on to but in fact and if I incidentally if I'd gone and signed on because I've been an athletic all my life I knew perfectly well that I would have been chucked straight out as his health was a problem Herron found approved employment in a pottery it just so happened that the pottery was incentives and belonged to the most distinguished Potter working in England at the time Bernard leach who was worshipped by dedicated disciples all over the world burn a spirituality or something that I used to rag him about actually I didn't care for about housing at all how am I even back in bed I mean working for burn at least during the war was a marvelous there's another it was of course an immense relief after all this health breaking down in these sort of chain gangs and the fans of a conscientious objector to certainly be extracted by circumstance actually and find ourselves in this oasis of work don'ts and eyes which I had always longed to get back I mean I'd left corner but tremendous lost out in there should leave a place like this man you don't get back in 1945 Herron married his wife Delia Rice had been a friend since their school days in well in Garden City he drew her and painted her portrait and also made delicate drawings of his mother and his brother after the war he was living in London and began writing for the new English weekly this brought him into contact with TS Eliot who commissioned a portrait from him I'd heard the temerity to ask him whether he'd been willing to sit but he knew my father is a friend of my father's a holiday English weekly drawing alchemy the end before that and he very very sweetly I've got these letters which I mean you can't imagine how charming he wasn't a totally unknown personal thing but he had been warned of my interest in the possibility of his features his room had a northern aspect favors his tiny little office and the first strike I made of him in March 1947 because Delia was pregnant with his daughter Katherine no the architect actually within my drawing in it but I made this first drawing about it was the first of us it was it was the most complete and less successful of the drawings I made from him he gave me a number of sittings and one at my father's house at Welland girl sitting which I painted a figurative oil study taking that seriously because at the back of my mind I almost what I was searching to doing what I don't anything I wanted I said I want to make your head equivalent to a coffeepot by Brock which he looks really over his glasses at me but anyway I said I was trying to make the sitter take his place as an equal part of the total design of the surface and I and this is really what has often and the final rather marquee double profile effect I mean you're interested in symbolism which I am NOT you could say that the power of the dark one it's a much younger version of Elliott than the 3/4 face into which it fits the end result of the entire process of nearly three years of painting and drawing and it was done from memory actually and and it was this very complex double profile painting the same is true of the a of the poster of her between I called her but the philosopher of Modern Art his activity was as it were the philosophy of Martin RB he was justify he was giving modern art its scientific credentials was afraid I used in reviewing a book of his ones but I made some drawings in 1949 I think probably just as I was finishing the Elliott C is I think where I'll have it in his office at radish and cake and Paul they were all from the left side of his head he was sitting there reading through manuscripts whereas the finished painting was done from memory and again I don't want to digest it these things and and I had Imran was finished - from the other side and it has a number of as it were profiles of the back and side of his head an air on that side and it was all done very quickly the whole thing was drawn in with this chocolate painted the whole thing was finished in about an hour but to rationalize these I I think it's because well Herbert talked his head was I decided to develop his own understanding of modern art Heron went to Paris and met one of the founders of cubism Georges Braque he drew this sketch of him from memory describing rocks paintings he wrote his is the massive harmony and calm which formal profundity and technical certainty always bestow on even the most disquieting subject matter for brock the painting itself is the message one of Brock's many aphorisms runs I love the rule which corrects the emotion in his planning about Antonette amazement they were ah raised round in an arc of about about six and easels all rather diminishing in size and there on one of them was the painting the like of which I've never yet seen but because it was one of the it was the first of the new late italia those later ten years which were Brock's last final sort of period and on a large scale there was one of those was already finished another one had just been begun and there were two others including very small budget not a bit that sort of subject but of still life or landscape very thickly I painted uh he said do you Mandy was fantastically good-looking man he was fantastically Curtis and he said do you mind if I just I must just use up these little bits of paint before we talk and on pallets raised on these curious twig like things there were just two tiny three tiny powers of pigment one was sort of cocky oneness caramel and when was walnut really and was a small brush he sort of picked these little bits of paint up and what if I had a place on one or other of these pictures to use it you know I thought this is fantastically interesting a grand apart from not wanting to waste anything it was extremely there was first time but I had ever thought of as it were working simultaneously on paintings within the same range Herron also admired the art of Matisse during the war in a dealer cellar in London he came across a painting by him called the red studio he returned to look at it week after week that's painting is now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York once it had hung in a Soho nightclub and no one in London wanted to buy it it was sold to an American for six hundred pounds well if one has to make one point about matty's it is a of course the by I I think he's much the greatest painter of the 20th century I think he's one of the very greatest painters of all time I'm not sure that he hasn't even greater than says the hello so that is a very great job I mean the fact is that every time you can go back every day to I look to Matias painting how it's just different different again and every painting that isn't a career that very long painting life is different from the next and nothing could be further removed from serious painting or serial painting especially the Americans then I mean you will feel that ease is starting with a brand new experience and it's not just the subjects that changed it's the structure everything about them changed and yet this overwhelming can he Cygnus the same man is the same feeling Pierre Bonnard herons third artistic hero was a contemporary of Matisse born in 1867 he was often regarded as a relatively minor figure following in the wake of the great impressionist the last of the impressionist and antum East but Barra is one of the greatest most daring artists of the of the 20th century he runs much he's a very very close second and it's to do with all manner of things it's to do with this fantastical original originality of handling the service the way the Bernard Ian lines wander about and wander up to the edges when he died I wrote my first essays on him one was refused by Cyril Connelly immediately for a horizon but the other was printed in world review in 1947 I wish to say then but his stature as a very innovative and essentially avant-garde painter is something that has never been established it's just beginning to be established now last year it is beginning to sink in but that huge bond and passed and America that he's not just an an Tamiya store Justin a end of Impressionism he's a very very daring semi abstract painter and an amazing colorist he took her in about 15 years to make the journey from a relatively descriptive kind of painting to his own kind of abstraction during that journey his art was always vibrant and free-flowing it was becoming increasingly complex as his visual explorations looked for new means of formal expression Christmas Eve 1951 was on the scale of a mural he presented to the eye a mosaic of shapes and colors caught up in a network of white lines almost like the leading in a stained-glass window all figurative art is abstract and all abstract artists iterative innocence sounds paradoxical but in fact at this stage well how does it were in you know evident one senses a very concrete sensation of a real place and this was the the drawing room of my parents house in well in Garden City it was a long room with polished oak floor walls running the length of it and here is a hand-woven rug with ridges a sort of bridge design in it there's a certain transparency about these objects I mean here is a chair made in Kendal my father ordered all his furniture in Kendall in 1980 and this is a rush bottom oak chair was with two low arms for putting a mite of beer on or something that very squat legs comfortable a chair but the line of the right goes clean through that here's my wife fixing candles on a Christmas tree there are two semicircular bay windows in this room and a window afar end and up against the far end is this grand piano pointed towards us the line which as it were suggests the underside of the bowing part bounding towards you suddenly turns into a line on the floor of a shadow I mean there are various readings at the top of that piano here for instance greatly magnified it is a very complex rather Victorian nobly leg going down to a caster here and here's another leg I'm here are the pedals and here's my mother's heel and her she's sitting here you can see whether more than an incident it was a pause of my mother still alive see my daughter who's no one as young as that my wife my other daughter this is a normal person there but pictorial reasons I wanted another figure but in fact we're we're only poor ladies in the family three generations in the early fifties Herron lived in London but visited st. Ives every year so knives have become the main center of modern painting in Britain coexisting with such major figures of the time as Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth there was also a younger generation of artists who formed a post-war avant-garde to which Herron belonged he rented a studio cottage in the centre of the town it overlooked a harbour and had a large balcony window the view from inside often appeared in his work paintings of rooms with views or as much an artistic convention as the still life with its obligatory bowl of fruit but Heron was reinterpreting the theme in a way that showed a great deal to the ideas of broch and Matisse originally in common with Matisse Braque and Picasso Heron thought that a totally abstract form of painting was impossible to achieve a figurative element was always there to act as a base for the formal manipulations that took place but by 1956 he was reaching the end of his figurative researchers interior garden window was the last important painting in which a descriptive pictorial element could be found the following year he painted his so-called camellia garden and the break with the figurative art was complete bold striped paintings that followed had a seminal place in the history of post-war modern art there were several years ahead of comparable American work it was a gesture of total commitment by 1962 Herron was writing it is obvious that color is now the only direction in which painting can travel painting is still a continent to explore in the direction of color and in no other direction I've realized that my overriding interest is in color color is birth the image and the meaning of my painting today [Music] until I was told but I move my hands about a lot I didn't know but thinking back I do know that I have not flying last as ever various ladies by mistake at Dilip on it I have not brought all over Barbara and they we had all gone upstairs to look down at the ocean after dinner to see if we could see the green flash from this great height which is an amazing thing actually this green flash I'm very very clear somebody and Barber said I must you must give me one of those little shot I said anytime and I just knocked from one hand with the other one of my nice little glasses big well actually and the we're all down Barbara's peacock blue trouser suit and sell anything she's I gave her a screech India took it to the bathroom but I've done that ever didn't in some of I was wearing a white dress once it happened at a restaurant right back that gym so I mean I I know my hands ought to be tied together [Music] Herron had bought Eagle's Nest in 1956 and could now spend most of his time in Cornwall in the house he remembered so vividly from childhood it was a turning point Eagles Nest was only four miles outside side Ives but it was in another world [Music] the picturesque delights of sand Ives have changed little since Whistler and Sicard discovered the place in 1884 it remained a much-loved Center for academic artists with their own societies and art schools who looked upon the modernists with some suspicion it was surprising that somewhere so far from London could become an active Centre for the avant-garde Herron seemed to be turning his back on the obvious sources of pictorial inspiration in order to experiment with his own rhythms colors and forms he was in a quite literal meaning of the word giving himself up to sensational painting and paint it is to which I now wish to draw your attention he said I don't wish to throw it in your face which Whistler accused Ruskin of doing but I do want very much to see if I can throw you into a state of absorption with the mysteries of paint itself because paint is what painting is made of it is central to herons faith that he believes that abstract art makes her world in a new way through that precise cap a perfect strike panting I mean what I'm really looking at is pale war cement dirty cement on the right even the bit of what I just put it in as a yellow band on the right of there then there's the blight blue dot then there's a much smaller piece of the war a slightly different gray there that's a very dark rich door and then there's a really dirty little bit of war I mean Tyrell is composing all the time by moving about in relation to what's in front him in 1959 he took over a large studio directly on the beach at Centaurs it had previously been occupied by Ben Nicholson was already known as Britain's most distinguished modern painter and was also very much the supremo of the sent eyes avant-garde inside the studio is completely cut off from the world it's only window in a courtyard is usually covered over with a sheet of plywood it's here rather than at eagle's nest that Heron finds his biggest pictures they're bold thrusting colors plays and forth the devices and emblems of a non-figurative pane nearly quarter of a century after some of the pictures had been painted Heron was reliving the experience and I found it was very very different from from my memory of it and what was different was that in my in memory I had immensely simplified it I mean this had become one solid yellow plane with about four or five or six color areas suspended as it were but in fact I'd completely forgotten that it had this touch and this quality and this I'd forgotten that that it revealed and I mean that there there are these color cover areas underneath this final scribble the whole mode of these paintings had changed from that very Swift sort of calligraphic single brushstrokes ever speak of the stripes and have become a sort of scribbly as something when pushed pushed around I mean in fact the paint is quite thin except in certain areas where actually knifed on that yellow final yellow is knife there every sort of common area here is almost different in its application of touch and feel I mean I was really saying that the subject of all painting is spatial color and that there is this experience which you gain from a pigmented flat surface to do with the illusion of space conveyed through color not food not through perspective on drawing but through juxtapositions of color this creates this experience which is unique from the surface of something called a painting it isn't anywhere else in nature at all it's and it's absolutely physical it's it's I mean as your eye focuses here that this and this and this exists in illusion at any number of different and that is really the that is the subject for painting it is this that you're contemplating I was in the National Gallery all day and I saw I suddenly honed in on the curve of a marvelous bowl with some grapes in it and a pomegranate somewhere else it was a part about the large complex figure composition one of the greatest paintings in that place I had never looked at this little still life rag was before but it's not fascination with a marvelous boat and some fantastic fruit but kept me so right up against that until one of the guards came up to see what mirth was going on I was in fact savoring in front of that bowl there's grapes that pomegranate underneath somebody's arm incidentally seen I was saving precisely the same kind of experience that I'm savoring when I look at this thing here which has absolutely no possible overt connection with anything outside the picture itself you cannot possibly say this is a still knife in disguise or Alaska is not one of the reasons why I have this picture it wasn't has never been shown in all the printed in three years of its life is that it didn't it did not sit down with all its with all the paintings made that same time and one of the main reasons why it didn't was because of this extraordinarily deep space which in parts of this picture seemed to be sort of evoked I mean from one point of view suddenly you feel that if you were a bird or a glider or pilot or something you could go clean through that track between the red mountain and the Green Mountain these two rocks have on the other hand once you once your eye hits that blue streak that blue gap there and-and-and-and recognizes it as paint it comes back again I mean almonds strong feelings about painting are strictly speaking relative and in time they changed this painting seemed to me to be outrageously three-dimensional almost sculptural it it outlawed itself from my house sort of resent the right work at the time it was painted and it's only just recently and now here in making it a retrospective selection but one suddenly realized one could bring it out and it would exist in its own right this painting was painted in 1977 and it's almost the last in the series which began rarely in 1963 in which very perversely having 762 that I didn't draw on a canvas before painting I immediately started drawing and in fact this painting and progressively up to the up to this painting over there's that more than a decade I use smaller and smaller brushes ending up by painting pictures this size with tiny Japanese watercolor brushes the reason of course the sort of logic which had propel run into this very strange procedure was that what one first did in fact was to draw on the white canvas in in my case with a pen tau and that would be done literally in 30 seconds I mean I simply do that and that and that this and that and that and that let 40 seconds that's indelible and that's the end of the matter then months would go by and one would have this extraordinary task of in filling this grid with color on a white ground one coat and I used these Japanese brushes because you get to these edges there's got to be a sort of the the nature of that edge has got somehow to be made to feel as if it isn't drawn but it's merely I think where the natural ending to this plane of color and this plane of colour was put on also with these very small brushes in fact it took 13 hours in the case of this one I will remember I started here kneeling down and spread this tide of cadmium red right out and across here right up to here up here 13 us you can't stop half way through because if you stopped there and had a cup of tea it would be a minimal grind you'd have a water line forever there is a real sense in which these lines these frontiers as I've always call them register great tension tension between these colored area shapes for about 15 years from the second half of the sixties and all the seventies whence painting really had sort of marched you know in a given direction and I simply felt at the end of the 70s as the 80s began in fact but my right arm rarely wanted to take up a large blunt brush and I wanted to make gestures once again much more freely and I wanted to do all the things which I hadn't been doing like mixing mixing colors all those colors and seventies have been straight from the tube in order but the intensity should be undiluted undiluted paint has the greatest chromatic intensity and so one wanted to start to show the ground again to mix the paint faintly and loosely and and to have large and indefinite scribbles simply to respond to a feeling and to visual feelings and so began this series of paintings which I have actually sort of called garden paintings in the sense and I can only say that like this painting here they have seemed to have a connection with the place where I live in the sense of the garden round the house when I painted this painting I have the feeling of the presence of that layer on West Cornish granite with the Sun fall on it and I had the feeling of the presence of ozone the presence of the Atlantic the fact that down there one is actually on the end of a the longest Peninsula in Yerevan and the whole thing has got light exploding in the air I go back to the garden from painting these pictures and I see as it were rhythmic characteristics of color and texture and distribution of texture in the garden which have just made their appearance in these paintings so there's a connection of some sort it's a curious thing isn't it I mean here is this garden which would have spent flowers at nearly 30 years hard at work Delia my wife who died and and before us the Holocaust has it changed all the time the formal is the I I used to cut all the hedges here shape all the path the lawns it's the shapes into which one has cut the bushes in the process of making them into windbreaks and making them windows and you find in a way you find very wrong but you've imitated not just the shapes that the rocks have been eroded into by these fantastic elemental forces of wind and rain but you're making shapes which dovetail into that monk there's a total harmony between the shapes you but isn't naturally going out as wind breaks and I mean it sounds totally ridiculous but in fact it's the case that the immense an overlap that can be demonstrated between these shapes of rocks windblown you can see what the wind forces do here I mean there's a build horse on out there it just looks like that I can remember the conscious processes of evolving the long generation I mean the disks these little inlets into the disks I can remember they sort of arrived almost accidentally in the process of compositional fast compositional drawing perhaps almost a slip of the hand was sort of distort a disk way back in 1962 or 61 or something and that kind of distorted disk is now demonstrably all over this Lincoln garden herons recent paintings with their garden associations have inevitably brought to mind the late paintings of Claude Monet paintings which were inspired by his lily ponds a journey and are now seen to be the ultimate achievement of his life herons own work is now entering a new phase we hoped you'd begin a new painting for the film but he was full of doubts and prevarication demonstration painting but that's what it really would be a demonstration I I what can't really sort of I mean you can't emphasize too much the amount of time you spend doing nothing in your studio I've actually had that cameras for 10 years and and and other cameras is like its next wave among the last of them now but one car I mean the amount of time you spend almost attack yet canvas doesn't you have I make these little tiny drawings the size of postage stamps and I say well allow something roughly like that but the moment which you actually decide it's almost an unconscious moment Christ Almighty I for all these years I've actually started a bloody thing and when you actually draw it in of course it's done very very fast and it's indelible forever I mean it's not surprising if you um it's a very special moment you can't it's you're in is essentially sort of in isolation when you make these decisions yeah but you see this is really my favorite painting war was this amazing light echoing round here one rather amusing thing is all these spots of paint means something to me because I can remember which painting was painted where just by looking at them the that big 15-foot one at the Barbican the white one of the last two big paintings the white summer garden the white garden painting here is all the stuff that fell off it you see over here there's some stuff from a painting with unfortunately got burnt in Australia that reminds me of that but anyway um when I do start that I shall take the Paula came off first of course here's a painting that could have gone to the bar because actually didn't because I thought it was bloody or fire so totally um totally um I mean I couldn't come to terms with it yeah the famous saying a Picasso that paintings changed all the time according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at them what's very brilliant Eliot was even more brilliant when he said I think he said that the poem the reader is aware of reading is never the same poem but the poet was conscious of having written and then really any Artic subtlety it may even be a better one I think you're fantastic well I mean I come in here Sunday so I think I'll really about bug about outfits just needs destruction but the distraction that one has in mind so to speak would be the way of advancing it into I don't know what I'm going to do that it's changed three times this week I hated it at the time barbecue share weight loss I didn't send it now here's one that's actually I've had this here for three years and as it were the row the thing I couldn't accept about it with part of me but on the other hand liked very much was its extreme lightness and water color quality and it's very very sort of pale this was one of the first people have noticed that the later paintings at the Barbican are personally and very very fluidly painted and so on and so well this is really the first of that I mean maybe it's a hanger and because I couldn't accept it three years ago I still have slight lies about it it may it may have perfected itself years ago and I'm just not used to effect but there's a painting over here which which this one here Wells them this could have gone to my my retrospective in Texas in 1978 it was supposed to go it was even cataloged but the reason it didn't get was this whole 70s method which I finally broke away from involved painting in areas separately on a white ground and Sarah painting like this would be in a condition where everything was painted except that shape that shape and possibly that shape but that's the condition it was in when the Texas pictures out I guess it stayed behind I finished it two years later in 1980 and there it is you slaughtered these you slaughtered these areas and now this little thing here this is the very very last just before the Barbican share and I even I my Maya current state of mind thought well that's just nothing didn't send it but now I actually think but but it's okay that's now decided to become a painting the 14-foot canvas has remained blank wrapped in its polythene dust-cover then on the last day four hours before the camera crew would you to leave Heron took up his immense brush as big as a golf club and some tubes of paint which he used as though they were brushes and began [Music] the quality of vitality alert Herron is written is something very closely connected with risk with pure during the artists who never feels as he starts a new picture at this time he's tempting madness to envelop him such an artist is no artist at all it's one of the excesses of painting his independence of the hand from the brain painting is thinking with one's hand once arm once old body painting Harris's like science cannot discover the same thing twice over its therefore compelled in those directions which the still undiscovered and unexplored dictate

Channel: Steve Haskett

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Keywords: Pat Heron, abstract art, st ives, documentary, sea

Id: uwFc9BkDb1Q

Length: 48min 8sec (2888 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 15 2020