Two Violet Squares in Tall Green

Discussing the work from the late 1950s, the artist, in conversation with Martin Gayford, commented: 'I remember other canvases where everything was pushed to one side for a long time. That was quite a novelty. It was the right-hand edge usually. I cleared the whole picture space, emptied it entirely, and then clustered forms down the right-hand edge of the canvas. I had written about Bonnard in 1947, just after he'd died, and described his habit of concentrating detailed forms along the four edges of his canvases while leaving the middle of pictures comparatively empty. The importance of the edge, and the greater intensity of the pictorial composition and incident the nearer to the edge it comes. Empty in the middle. Concentrated around the edges. The edges - this is a Heronian dictum - are the first four formal statements of any painting.

Right through this period one is enclosing colour-area-shapes within a larger colour-area-shape which some people would call 'the ground'. But to call it the ground implies that it has less integrity and positiveness as a shape than the others, that it is just a background'. (Patrick Heron, Tate Gallery Exhibition Catalogue, 1998, p.38).