Winchester Four III

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, Whitehall

Winchester Four III is one of a series of four screenprints made by Patrick Heron at the printmaking facilities of Winchester Art School, where he was teaching at that time. The series of four prints shows shifting colour relationships, as underlying abstract compositions, in different tones of blue, combined with red, black and yellow and green. Printmaking had been an integral part of Heron’s practice before he shifted his focus to abstract painting. Winchester Four marked his return to printmaking. At this time, he was focusing on what he termed ‘wobbly-hard edged’ colour field painting, where his fields of colour were painted using Japanese watercolour brushes to build a chromatic intensity of colour. Winchester Four reflects the intense precision of colour, which he was trying to achieve in his painting at that time, and which he found in his return to print-making.

Patrick Heron was born in Leeds and studied at the Slade School of Art in London from 1937-39. During the 2nd World War he was an assistant at the Bernard Leach pottery in St Ives, where he met Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. From 1953-56 he taught at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. Until 1955 he worked in a figurative style derived from Matisse, painting still life and interiors with bright colours and complex spatial relationships. His conversion to pure abstraction in 1956 coincided with his move to Eagle’s Nest, Zennor, near St Ives in Cornwall, where he lived and worked until his death. Heron was appointed a CBE in 1977 and was a trustee of the Tate from 1980 until 1987. A major retrospective of his work was held at the Tate in 1998 and his work can be found in international collections including Tate; the Arts Council Collection; and the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh.

Places

Subjects

abstract, St. Ives School

Materials & Techniques

paper (as artists material), screenprint

Artist

Patrick Heron (1920 - 1999)

Title

Winchester Four III

Edition

24/33

Date

May 1967

Medium

Screenprint

Acquisition

Purchased from Leslie Waddington Prints Ltd, December 1974

Inscription

below image: Winchester Four IV: May 1967 24/33 / Patrick Heron

GAC number

11784