Towards Interpretation of Making, Meaning, and Change in British Twentieth Century Oil Paintings: The Relevance of an Artist’s Paint Archive

Abstract

A rare opportunity to document materials in an artist's studio brought unexpected insight into his material preferences and working patterns. It revealed practical solutions to picture-making long-since absorbed by the artist, Patrick Heron (1920-1999), into the instinctive act of painting and left un-articulated in interviews or commentaries. The large quantity of oil paint in 155 different colours led to questions as to why so much variety, which brands and qualities were favoured, which paints had been in current use and in what combination, and which had been rejected. A selection of this paint was donated by the Heron Estate to Tate, London, for research purposes. On its own, the Heron Paint Archive is a simple collection of tubes. In the context of documentation and oral histories, a more subtle and complex reality emerges with implications for the interpretation of physical properties, visual phenomena and analysis of British colourfield paintings of the mid to late twentieth century. Heron's oil paintings, purposefully unvarnished, are water-sensitive.