Blue November Painting: Nov 1963

Discussing the pictures from the mid 1960s, Mel Gooding has commented 'the affective and conceptual potency of Heron's paintings in the mid 1960s - their capacity to delight and intrigue - is a function of their intrinsic visual dynamics, of the games they invite the eye and the mind to play in the field contained by their physical limits. Their appeal is directly sensational; they have no symbolic burden, they make no deliberate allusions to things in the world, they invite no particular associations. Several years before this Heron had adopted the practice of giving his paintings titles almost always factually descriptive, enumerating specific features (squares or disks), or indicating precisely the names of the colours used in the picture (Heron has always taken a special pleasure in these names). This is not to say that in contemplating these paintings we are not free to find allusive traces or to make our own association: how could it be otherwise? Colour is inevitably evocative; it's intensities and hues are described by terms that have other dimensions of meaning: deep, dark, light, cool, hot; shapes have differing relations of contiguity: they nudge, collide, intrude or invade, hover above or below, envelope; a floating disc recalls sun or moon; a rectangle of colour suggests a window. These images are occasions for memory and recognition; lacking denotation they call forth a language rich in connotations, a language not of the relationship between things but of relationships per se. In this sense, and in this sense only, the formal relations of colour and shape in these paintings are metaphorical' (see M. Gooding, Patrick Heron, London, 1994, p. 175).