£20,160
Avant Garde : Art from 1890 to Now | 743
Auction: 27 April 2023 at 19:00 BST
signed, titled and dated on artist's label (verso)
gouache on paper
Provenance
The Estate of the Artist
Waddington Galleries, London, where acquired by the present owner in 2006
'My gouaches are not a substitute for the oil paintings, nor are they preliminary sketches, or means for trying out new colour-shapes or configurations of dovetailed colour-shapes to feature in later paintings on canvas. They are works in their own right; and their quality, in fact, doesn’t even overlap with the canvases’ in many respects. Or so I feel…In my gouaches, the tempo is dictated, quite apart from the particular needs of the area-shapes I make, by the nature of the wet medium itself. I like the water in the paint mixture to lead me: to suggest the scribbled drawing which gives birth to the images…My gouaches have always had this fast-moving fluidity of drawing, and a softness, coming from the watery medium itself, which the oil paintings cannot share…[and a]…quality of fluent, fluid colour.'
Patrick Heron, 'A Note on my Gouaches', written to accompany his exhibition at the Caledonian Club, Edinburgh, 1985; quoted in Patrick Heron: Gouaches from 1961 to 1996, Waddington Galleries, London, 9 February – 12 March 2005, p.5