Orange horizon

'From 1958 Heron consciously sought both the asymmetry of image and format and the varied handling and speed of paint application which he had missed in the Abstract Expessionists. The rapid and spontaneous execution of his 'Garden' and striped canvases was replaced by a lengthier process which he has described as 'merely pushing fluid paint this way and that, with a blunt brush, until each colour area met finally along a blurred and rather fuzzy edge'. He explained that in this way he was 'allowing varied quantities of colour to come to terms with each other. The soft-edged colour-areas exist not so much in their own right, as formal shapes; instead they come into being ... in order to accommodate colour as such'. The lozenges and round-cornered squares which at first occupied the whole surface seemed to hang at different depths behind the picture plane, some overpainted so that they barely broke through the ground ... A gestural and varied brushwork created shapes that appeared to float in or barely emerge from the broad expanse of colour, or which were scribbled directly onto the surface or incised with the brush handle into the wet paint' (see V. Knight, Exhibition catalogue, Patrick Heron, London, Barbican Art Gallery, 1985, p. 10).