Black Painting with White Squares

Mel Gooding comments on Heron's works of this period, 'They have a textural richness and visual sonority that is new to Heron's work, and derives from successive over-painting and a palette that exploits every resource of colour chromatic and tonal. The final image is the outcome not of predetermined design but of intuitive manipulations of paint, of a kind of collaboration, at once measured in pace and spontaneous in execution, with the material. The colour shapes - 'round-squares', lozenges, soft-edged discs - were often set down only to be engulfed, like islands in a flood or rising tide of colour, to survive only as traces just visible beneath the surface of the irregular areas of predominating colour. Those that remain in the final configuration, their edges indefinite and sometimes surrounded by a halo of light from an even earlier layer of lighter or darker paint, or from an over-lap of layers, are in some cases like those luminous apertures first seen in the earliest pictures of this period; in others, they float on top of or in front of the title colour, being the last-painted patches, the latest shapes to have arrived'.

'Many years later, in The Shapes of Colour (1973), Heron described the making of these paintings as a kind of 'juggling' with the soft-edged squares, and remarked the tendency of these shapes to '[edge] up into one of the corners, or [move], almost visibly, along one of the canvas's edges as if drawn by a magnet' ... These paintings present us with images of inconstancy, of forms as impermanent and insubstantial as clouds, whose occupation of space ... is as implicitly provisional as the configurations that cohere in the momentary serenity of a day or night sky. That 'larger process' from which they abstract an entirely non-figurative image is nothing less than the dynamic of those relations, spatial and atmospheric, that constitutes the world of light, saturated with colour, where we live' (see Patrick Heron, London, 1994, p. 161).