Page 22 - Studio International - December 1969

Colour in space and pictorial colour are virtually environment. Awareness of colour, in my
sense, is therefore a means of leading one
synonymous. That is to say, for the human eye
my paintings colour that does not create its own space. towards the everyday realities of one's physical
there is no space without its colour; and no
environment; and not, as is the case with the
When you open your eyes, the texture of the psychedelic, of charming one away from
Patrick Heron entire visual field ( which opening them reveals physical reality. It seems to me that the
movement of the unsubstantial rainbow lights
to you) consists of one thing; and that thing
is colour. Variations in this colour texture in the psychedelic film-show tend mainly to
(which sight reveals to us) are indications seduce the spectator into a more or less
that form exists: but colour is there first, in hysterical dreamworld, while the fully con­
that it is the medium through which form is scious concentration upon colour relation­
communicated visually. And so, in mani­ ships in painting, and upon the sort of spatial
pulating colour, painting is organizing the illusion th ey generate, is an exercise leading
very stuff of which sight or vision consists. to a real-not an imagined-heightening of
That space and form can also exist in the the senses.
dark, as it were, to the scientific mind, I am Early in 1957, when painting my first hori­
not denying. But it is not with abstract con­ zontal and vertical colour-stripe paintings,
cepts of space, on either a molecular or an the reason why the stripes sufficed, as the
interstellar scale, that the painter is concerned formal vehicle of the colour, was precisely
so much as with those perfectly concrete and that they were so very uncomplicated as
physical sensations of space which flood in all shapes. I realized that the emptier the gen­
the time upon the human retina. And these eral format was, the more exclusive the
are sensations of space apprehended in terms of concentration upon the experiences of colour
colour. itself. With stripes one was free to deal on(y
Ten years ago I used to feel that I was not with the interaction between varying quanti­
'designing' a canvas so much as allowing ties of varied colours, measured as expanses
varied quantities of colour to come to terms or areas. One was unconscioµsly resisting,
with each other. The soft-edged colour-areas perhaps, being side-tracked at that stage by
existed not so much in their own right, as the more complex interactions which are set
formal shapes; instead, they came into being up along the frontiers of colour-areas when
(or so it seemed) in order to accommodate those frontiers are themselves more complex
colour as such: I had the feeling that 'colour in character than the relatively straight lines
determines the actual shapes, or areas, which which separated the bands or stripes in my
balance one another ... in my painting'. Since 1957 stripe paintings. The history of my
1962, however, the defining frontiers which exploration of colour since 195 7 is, very
divide one area of colour from the next in my roughly, the history of the extension of one's
canvases have become increasingly sharp and investigation into more complicated situations
precise, until today they are very tightly involving the progressive recomplication of
drawn indeed. Still, the interest which had the pictorial format. (I stressed the need
progressively compelled me, over these past for this 're-complication' in an article in Studio
seven years, to sharpen these frontiers was not, International for December, 1966, entitled 'The
at the time, a growing-or a returning­ Ascendancy of London in the Sixties' and
conscious interest in design or format or form pointed out that the Americans were bogged­
or in any sense in the shapes which my down in academic minimalism.)
areas assumed; it was simply an obsession All sensation of colour is relative. I mean by
Writing about my painting seven years ago with the interaction of colours, one upon this that it is not until there is more than one
('A Note on My Painting: 1962' published in another. The contemplation of pure colour colour in the visual field that we can be fully
Art International) I said that 'Colour is both holds pleasures too numerous to name here; aware of either or any of the colours involved.
the subject and the means; the form and the in fact there is an intense elation in allowing If I stand only eighteen inches away from a
content; the image and the meaning, in my awareness of colour to flood the mind-and fifteen-foot canvas that is uniformly covered
painting today'. And becoming more didactic, this was clear to me years before Huxley made in a single shade of red, say, my vision being
I went on ... 'it is also obvious that colour is mescalin famous; personally I am not in the entirely monopolized by red I shall cease
now the on(y direction in which painting can least interested in what is now loosely known within a matter of seconds to beful(y conscious
travel . . . ' Nine years before that I had also as psychedelic colour-the sensational and of that red: the redness of that red will not be
written: 'Colour is the utterly indispensable hallucinatory nature of which couldn't be restored until a fragment of another colour is
means for realizing the various species of more opposed to the calm actuality of the allowed to intrude, setting up a reaction. It is
pictorial space.' This was in the catalogue colour I value in painting. I dislike intensely in this interaction between differing colours
introduction for the exhibition which I had the filmy, essentially unsubstantial, trans­ that our full awareness of any of them lies. So
arranged in July, 1953, at the Hanover parent, veil-like revolving vapours of 'colour' the meeting-lines between areas of colour are
Gallery, London, and which I had called now universally associated with 'the psyche­ utterly crucial to our apprehension of the
'Space in Colour'. delic'. The sensation of space I value is one actual hue of those areas: the linear character
Space in colour. To me, this is still the most generated by plain opaque surfaces placed at of these frontiers cannot avoid changing our
profound experience which painting has to a measurable distance before my face: thus, sensation of the colour of those areas. Hence
offer-this is true whatever the period, idiom the contemplation of colour I refer to is some­ a jagged line separating two reds will make
or style-and it is unique to painting. Because thing which heightens my accurate awareness them cooler or hotter, pinker or more orange,
painting is exclusively concerned with the of my own physical position in relation to than a smoothly looping or rippling line. The
seen, as distinct from the known, pictorial such surfaces, and to my actual physical line changes the colour of the colours on either side
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