Composition

Heron wrote in a piece to accompany his 1985 exhibition of gouaches at the Caledonian Club, Edinburgh, 'My gouaches are not a substitute for the oil paintings. Nor are they preliminary sketches, or means for trying out new colour-shapes or configurations of dovetailed colour-shapes to feature in later paintings on canvas. They are works in their own right; and their quality, in fact, doesn't even overlap with the canvases' in many respects. Or so I feel ... My gouaches have always had this fast-moving fluidity of drawing, and a softness, coming from the watery medium itself, which the oil paintings cannot share. Throughout the 1970s, in fact my gouaches and my oil paintings occupied very different departments in the field of pictorial experience' (see V. Knight (Ed.), Patrick Heron, Hatfield, 1988, p. 38).