Disc Fragments in Red

In 1963 Heron began to plan his compositions through drawing the shapes in charcoal directly onto the canvas. Although these paintings were initially inspired by the hard-edged modernism that Ben Nicholson demonstrated in his geometric reliefs, Heron's evident brushmarks convey an organic element in the works. From 1965, the shapes themselves became freer and asymmetrical and there is no division, unlike earlier works, between the coloured forms and the ground that they are painted on. Instead, as in the present work, the sense of depth is explored through the juxtapositioning of pure colour areas.

Vivien Knight writes that in Heron's paintings of the period, ''line' existed only as the meeting edge between colour areas. Heron recognised that the character of their mutual boundary conditioned the perception both of their relative spatial positions and of their colours: the sharper and more irregular their complex, fretted, interlocking edge, the more intensely adjacent colours would interact. Only a single skin of pure colour was applied, gaining brilliancy from the white priming beneath; the ground was prevented from appearing at the surface (and dulling the interaction of the colours) by Heron's method of painting exactly up to each colour boundary with a small Japanese watercolour brush' (V. Knight, Patrick Heron, London, 1988, pp. 12-3).