![Patrick Heron - Blue Painting (Squares and Disc) [1958-59]](http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3928/15384810549_71c91b7a83_o.jpg)
By the time Patrick Heron (1920 - 1999) completed Blue Painting (Squares and Disc) in February 1959, he was near the end of a three-year-long burst of creativity and experimentation that had established him, without doubt, as one of the most avant-garde painters working in Britain and which was to lead to international recognition as one of the foremost abstract artists of the post-war period. In these short years, Heron definitively laid down on canvas those ideas on the relationship of space to colour (‘space in colour’ to use his phrase) that he had eloquently discussed in his many articles on European and American art. Through intense passages of painting, during which entire compositions could be mapped out in just a few hours, as well as considered returns to the easel, where he would adjust, overlay and re-balance, the palimpsest nature of the work always left exposed, Heron explores the interplay between layers and colours, his surfaces that have been scrubbed-back or laid over in thick impasto figuring the ghost in the machine.
[Sold for £506,500 at Sotheby’s, London - Oil on canvas, 152.5 x 122 cm]