Floating Reds: December 1962

Heron wrote in 'A Note on my Painting: 1962', 'For a very long time, now, I have realised that my over-riding interest is colour. Colour is both the subject and the means; the form and the content; the image and the meaning, in my painting to-day ... It is obvious that colour is now the only direction in which painting can travel. Painting has still a continent left to explore, in the direction of colour (and in no other direction) ... It seems obvious to me that we are still only at the beginning of our discovery and enjoyment of the superbly exciting facts of the world of colour. One reels at the colour possibilities now: the varied and contrasting intensities, opacities, transparencies; the seeming density and weight, warmth, coolness, vibrancy; or the superbly inert "dull" colours - such as the marvellously uneventful expanses of the surface of an old green door in the sunlight' (see V. Knight, Patrick Heron, London, 1988, p. 34).