Patrick Heron

Patrick Heron (1920 - 1999)

Patrick Heron was born in Leeds. He lived in Cornwall and Welwyn Garden City before registering as a conscientious objector during the Second World War. Moving back to Cornwall he worked with Bernard Leach, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. After the war he established a reputation as a leading abstract artist and critic moving permanently to Cornwall in 1956. He married, raised two daughters, and received a CBE in 1977. In the obituary published in The Independent, Marc Lopatin reflected that 'Heron used that most rare and uncanny of gifts: the ability to invent an imagery that was unmistakably his own, and yet which connects immediately with the natural world as we perceive it, and transforms our vision of it. Like those of his acknowledged masters, Braque, Matisse and Bonnard, his paintings are at once evocations and celebrations of the visible, discoveries of what he called "the reality of the eye".'