Peter Lanyon in his studio in St Ives, early August 1954. Photograph by Adrian Flowers
In early August 1954, Adrian and Angela Flowers visited Peter Lanyon in ‘The Attic Studio’ in St. Ives, to photograph both the artist and his work. The results are preserved in two rolls of 120 black and white negative film held in the Adrian Flowers Archive. In one photograph, wearing his trademark black beret, and dressed in short-sleeved shirt and sleeveless pullover, Lanyon demonstrates the mixing of artists’ colours, using a muller (mortar) and glass sheet. Another image shows the artist leaning against a cupboard, with Angela seated on a couch beside him. In the background is a book press and a rotary grindstone. Hanging on the wall is the 1948 painting Headland (Tate collection). A third photograph shows the artist standing before his studio easel, pointing out details in a large painting in progress, Blue Boat and Rainstorm. In another image, Lanyon, smiling, leans against his workbench. On the windowsill stands a construction, while hanging on the wall is an antelope horn—a trophy probably brought back from South Africa, where Lanyon, aged twenty, had visited relatives. Also photographed were the slender columnar 1948 Construction, the 1951 Porthleven Boats, both now in the Tate collection, and Construction for Bojewyan Farms, a painted sculpture of curving forms dating from 1952 and now in a private collection. Another work photographed by Flowers that day include Lanyon’s plaster sculpture of a bull, from his Europa series. This was a work in progress, with copper pipes projecting from the animal’s head, forming an armature for plaster horns. The concept for the classically-inspired Europa series had taken shape in Anticoli Corrado, the hilltop town east of Rome, where Lanyon and his wife Sheila had stayed for four months the previous year.
Peter Lanyon with Blue Boat and Rainstorm in 1954, observed by Angela Flowers. Photograph by Adrian Flowers
Lanyon was pleased with the photographs, and wrote to Flowers not long afterwards, requesting permission to use a black and white image of one of the works photographed during that session, for a book being produced by Patrick Heron. Lanyon offered to call to Flowers’ studio when he was in London on Monday 20th September, to collect the photograph. To assist Flowers in identifying the work [Construction for St. Just (1952, Tate collection)], Lanyon included a sketch in his letter [PL to AF at 44A Dover Street, letter in AF Archive c Sept 1954]. A painted sculpture made from discarded window panes, and inspired by pencil and charcoal sketches of the town that was once the centre of the Cornish tin mining industry, Construction for St. Just reveals how Lanyon was not only inspired by the art of Naum Gabo, but also used his own three-dimensional works to guide the completion of paintings, described them as akin to the scaffolding used to support a building in progress. In 1953, the painting that resulted from this process, St. Just, was shown at the Hanover Gallery in London in Space in Colour, an exhibition selected by Patrick Heron. It is now also in the Tate collection.
Just ten years later, the early death of Lanyon robbed British art of one of its stars. His career had been short but brilliant, his work carrying forward a Romantic vision, in which the energy and zest of Cornwall’s coastal landscape was infused with European formalism and Mediterranean colour, resulting in paintings that are in every way equal to the best abstract expressionist work produced in America, but also infused with a sense of history and human endeavour.
Peter Lanyon in his studio, August 1954
Born into a well-off mining family, and educated at Clifton College in Bristol, Lanyon had taken great pride in his Cornish ancestry. Photography and music were part of his early education, and while still a teenager he took painting lessons with Borlase Smart in St Ives. In 1937 Adrian Stokes advised Lanyon to enroll at the Euston Road School, where Victor Pasmore and Naum Gabo were tutors, and he studied also at the Penzance School of Art. Back in St. Ives, it was inevitable that Lanyon would meet Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, who had moved to Cornwall in the 1930’s, as did Gabo. During WWII, Lanyon served as a flight mechanic with the RAF in North Africa and Palestine. He was also stationed in Southern Italy for two years, during which time he painted murals and gave lectures on art. He ran an art education workshop for servicemen, developing his own austere, psycho-analytical, but optimistic approach to art. In 1946 he married Sheila St John Browne and over the next decade they had six children; their son Andrew also becoming an artist. Lanyon was inspired by Ben Nicholson’s approach to abstraction, and during the 1940’s made constructions that show the influence of both Nicholson and Gabo. He was a founding member of the Penwith Society of Arts in 1949, and had his first exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery in London that same year. In 1951, as part of the Festival of Britain, the newly-created Arts Council commissioned sixty artists to create large-scale paintings. One of these, Porthleven (British Council collection), an abstract work by Lanyon, is ambitious and hectic, crammed full of allusions to birds, gliders, harbours and quays, the composition surmounted by the clock tower of the Bickton-Smith Institute overlooking the harbour of Porthleven. Lanyon, Heron and Bryan Wynter were also included in the exhibition “Abstract Art”, curated by Adrian Heath at the AIA Gallery, and in another important show, British Abstract Art, held at Gimpel Fils, that same year. In the early 1950’s Lanyon taught at Corsham College of Art, where William Scott was also a tutor, and later that decade he, William Redgrave and Terry Frost ran a school, at St. Peter’s Loft in St. Ives, with Nancy Wynne-Jones among the artists attending. Lanyon’s first New York exhibition was at the Catherine Viviano Gallery in 1957, when he met Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and other artists. Over the following years he showed regularly at the Viviano Gallery. There was a demand for Lanyon’s work in the US, and in 1962 he painted a mural in the house of Stanley Seeger, in New Jersey. Initially tightly constructed, Lanyon’s work during the 1960’s became freer and more painterly. He took up gliding so as to appreciate the physical beauty of the Cornish landscape from the air, but died in a gliding accident in 1964, aged just forty-six.
From the photo shoot for the opening of Angela Flowers Gallery on 10th February 1970, artists from front left: Tom Phillips, Brendan Neiland, John Loker, Roy Ascott, David Troostwyk, Derek Hirst, Patrick Hughes and Lis Sutton. Photograph by Adrian Flowers, on 17th January 1970
On February 10th 1970, Angela Flowers opened her first art gallery, at the Artists International Association (AIA) building in Lisle Street, London. This pioneering venture, by a woman who had extensive knowledge of the contemporary art world, but little previous gallery experience, captured the imagination, and financial support, of a small group of patrons and artists, including Adrian Heath, Len Deighton, and Angela’s cousin, a member of the Courtauld family. Several weeks earlier, on 17th January, the artists who were to be represented by the new gallery had assembled, and were photographed by Adrian Flowers. They included John Loker, Brendan Neiland, Roy Ascott, David Troostwyk, Derek Hirst, Patrick Hughes, Lis Sutton and Tom Phillips. Robert Heller later wrote of the new gallery: “Its start was modest, in one of London’s smallest commercial spaces – the top floor of a converted house in Lisle Street, off Leicester Square. Apart from a brief period at the ICA, Angela Flowers had never worked in an art gallery, but was widely respected in the art world as a knowledgeable and keen visitor to exhibitions. She knew many artists personally, partly through many visits to St. Ives. She boldly accepted the challenge of taking the Lisle Street premises from the Artists’ International Association, which occupied the rest of the house, and set about creating a distinctive style of her own.” Artist and AIA member Adrian Heath was a key figure in the venture. An early supporter of Terry Frost, two decades earlier, in 1951, Heath had organised an exhibition of abstract art at the AIA Gallery. He remained a leading figure in contemporary art over the following years. In 1970 he negotiated the agreement between Angela and the AIA, enabling the new venture to get going. The inaugural exhibition was of work by Patrick Hughes, who Angela had met while working at the ICA. “We booked a table at Trattoria Terrazza” recalls Angela “and my first ever customers were there, the dress designer Thea Porter and Frank and Corinne Streich, an American couple working in advertising and journalism.” The dinner was memorable. At the time, Hughes’ partner was Molly Parkin, fashion editor at the Sunday Times. The exhibition was a great success, as was the following exhibition of work by Derek Hirst. Quickly, in an art world dominated by institutions such as the Marlborough Galleries and Waddingtons, Angela Flowers established a niche for herself, identifying and encouraging young talent and taking risks that more established galleries shied away from. Other artists who showed with Angela in those early years were Jeff Nuttall, Penelope Slinger, Ian Breakwell, Jeanne Masoero and Nancy Fouts.
Patrick Hughes and Angela Flowers photographed by Adrian Flowers 17th January 1970 for the opening of Angela Flowers Gallery
Having grown and flourished over the past half-century, with Angela now as Chairman, and her son Matthew as Managing Director, the idea that germinated in Lisle Street in 1970 has grown into a world-wide enterprise, with spaces in Cork Street, East London, New York and Hong Kong. On February 10th 2020, the fiftieth anniversary of the Gallery was celebrated, at Flowers Gallery, Kingsland Road, Shoreditch.
Marked up contact sheet photograph. Artists (as above), joined by Angela Flowers in the centre. Photograph by Adrian Flowers
Denis Mitchell in his studio September 1954. Photograph by Adrian Flowers
Beginning in July 1954, Adrian and Angela Flowers, and their year-old son Adam, made the first of what was to become a series of regular visits to St. Ives. Setting out to photograph the artists and writers who had made the town famous, during this first visit Adrian also photographed other aspects of Cornish life, including carpenters at work and a traditional mummer.
Denis Mitchell (1912 – 1993) A sequence of photographs document the studio of Denis Mitchell. An abstract sculptor, working mainly in wood and bronze, Mitchell was an early member of the St. Ives group, having moved to Cornwall from Wales in 1930. Located in the former workshop of plumbers W. F. Smithson, his studio was a timber and corrugated iron building, in a cobbled courtyard off one of the town’s narrow streets. The entrance was decorated with abstract paint marks, perhaps made by Mitchell himself. Upstairs, the interior contained a cast iron stove, workbenches and timber sculptures. The whitewashed walls were decorated with paintings, antelope antlers and an African mask. At the side of the studio was an improvised rack for holding lengths of timber.
Denis Mitchell in his studio, September 1954. Photograph by Adrian Flowers
Present that September day were Mitchell, Stanley Dorfman and Terry Frost. Angela and young Adam were there also. Mitchell, then in his early ‘40s, was photographed sitting in an Victorian armchair, hand under chin, looking grave and thoughtful. Since moving to Cornwall twenty-four years earlier, he and his brother Endell had contrived to make a living in St. Ives, renovating houses and growing vegetables and flowers. St. Ives was famous for its early spring flowers, violets and the yellow narcissus Soleil D’or. In 1938 Endell became landlord of the Castle Inn on Fore Street, the pub that was later to be the birthplace of the Penwith Society. Around this time Denis, working in a craft market, met Jane Stevens; they married in 1939 and were to have three daughters. During WWII, Mitchell worked in the local tin mines, learning to hew stone deep in the narrow mine shafts. He also served in the Home Guard, where he met the potter Bernard Leach and art critic Adrian Stokes. Encouraged by Leach, in 1946 Mitchell joined the St. Ives Society of Artists, and three years later was taken on as an assistant by Barbara Hepworth at Trewyn Studio. When Adrian photographed him, he had been working with Hepworth for five years, learning the art and craft of abstract sculpture. In 1955 he became chairman of the Penwith Society, and later joined John Wells at his Trewarveneth Studio in Newlyn. Mitchell is credited with inspiring many younger artists, including Broen O’Casey and Conor Fallon. Another photograph by Adrian shows Dorfman and Mitchell standing together in the studio, with Frost descending the staircase. This introduction to the artists of St. Ives ultimately led Angela, some years later, to open her first gallery in London. For two decades Mitchell was one of her leading artists. A major exhibition of his work opened at the Angela Flowers Gallery in March 1993, just before his death.
Terry Frost, Stanley Dorfman and Denis Mitchell at Mitchell’s studio, September 1954. Photograph by Adrian Flowers
Stanley Dorfman A television and film producer, renowned for introducing Top of the Pops to BBC audiences in the 1960’s, Stanley Dorfman was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. Aged nineteen he began to study architecture, but switched instead to fine art and in 1946 was awarded a scholarship to the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. After spending six years in France, Dorfman and his wife and children went back to South Africa to see his parents, but they found the political system there repellent. In 1954, he moved to England, settling in the artists’ colony of St. Ives, where he worked as a studio assistant to Barbara Hepworth, while continuing to develop his own art. His wife and children remained in South Africa until Dorfman could afford to bring them to Europe. His paintings from this early period are hard-edged abstract works, with strong flat colours and titles such as Vertical St. Ives (Paul), Blue and Brown Study, and Composition with Four Rectangles. His 1954 painting Across the Bay features abstracted hard-edge waves.
Stanley Dorfman, September 1954. Photograph by Adrian Flowers
He also created three-dimensional panels which, while paying homage to Mondrian and De Stijl, hark back to mosaic designs and wall pieces he had made in South Africa. In South Africa also, Dorfman had organised music concerts, featuring jazz musicians. This interest in music remained with him, and in 1964 he left St. Ives to work as an art director with BBC television, then as producer and director of the popular weekly music programme Top of the Pops. Meeting Dick Clark who had travelled from the United States to England in search of new talent, Dorfman began to alternate between New York and London. He a created a series for the BBC called ‘In Concert’, beginning with Randy Newman, and followed by Joni Mitchell. In 1968 he had Leonard Cohen on the show. During his long career in British film and television, Dorfman directed over two hundred shows, with musicians such as the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Elton John and David Bowie. In 1974 he decided to relocate to Los Angeles, where he directed and produced music videos for many artists, from Robert Plant to Emmy Lou Harris. He took over Dick Clark’s In Concert series and also worked with Yoko Ono on videos, made using footage taken by John Lennon. He collaborated with David Bowie on two videos, Be My Wife and Heroes, both from 1977, and both in the collection of MoMA. After a career as music producer and director, Dorfman returned to painting. His later works, more lyrical and painterly, often reference music, as in La Bamba and Imagine. His partner of some forty years is the actor Barbara Flood. Dorfman currently lives in Los Angeles, and exhibits his paintings there at The Lodge gallery.
David Lewis with Terry Frost and family, Smeaton’s Pier, St Ives, May 1956. Photograph by Adrian Flowers
Terry Frost (1915 – 2003) A second visit by the Flowers family to St. Ives followed in December 1954, and a subsequent visit in May 1956, when Adrian photographed Terry and Kathleen Frost, with their young sons Adrian and Anthony. The group assembled on Smeaton’s Pier, with the harbour and Wharf in the background. Terry’s warm and convivial personality shines through in these images. He and Kath took raising a large family in their stride. He would often get up at 6am, to take the toddlers for a walk on the quay. In one shot, he holds up Anthony, while pointing to the sky.
Terry Frost with son Anthony and ?… in St Ives, May 1956. Photograph by Adrian Flowers
Born in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire in 1915, Frost had led a varied life before coming to St. Ives. The son of an artilleryman, he left school aged fourteen to work first at a cycle repair shop, then at Armstrong-Whitworth, the company renowned for its battleships and locomotives (and also for the universal ‘Whitworth’ thread that standardised nuts and bolts). By the time Frost went to work for the company at Coventry, it was called Vickers-Armstrong, and was making Whitley bombers, on the wings and fuselages of which he painted RAF roundels. Having enlisted in the Territorials, during WWII Frost served in France, Palestine and Greece. Fighting with the commandos in Crete in June 1941, he was taken prisoner and spent the rest of the war in POW camps. At Stalag 383 in Bavaria, he found he had a talent for sketching portraits of fellow prisoners, using canvases made from hessian pillowcases, primed with glue size made from barley soup. The brushes were made from horsehair. He painted around two hundred portraits, and also met the artist Adrian Heath who encouraged him to take up painting as a profession. Having studied with Stanhope Forbes in Newlyn, Heath was familiar with Cornwall and its tradition of welcoming artists. Frost credited the semi-starvation he experienced during the war as helping him achieve a higher level of spiritual awareness; this no doubt contributed to the qualities of alertness and intellectual presence that characterise his art in the post-war period. After the war, on returning to England, Frost enrolled firstly at the Birmingham College of Art, then at Camberwell School of Art. In 1945, he married Kathleen Clarke, who had worked in aircraft factory during the war. The following year, forgoing a job as a lightbulb salesman, and availing of his soldiers’ back pay that had built up during years of imprisonment, he moved to St. Ives with Kath and their first-born son. They lived in Headland Row, overlooking Porthmeor beach, while he attended the St. Ives School of Art, and also worked in a café to make ends meet. The St. Ives School was run by Leonard Fuller and Marjorie Mostyn, both dedicated artists: Fuller painted a portrait of Terry Frost with his young son on his knee. In 1947 Frost’s first exhibition Paintings with Knife and Brush was held at Downing’s bookshop. Returning to Camberwell in 1948, he studied under Victor Pasmore, Ben Nicholson and William Coldstream. Pasmore was at this time moving towards abstraction, and Frost followed his lead. Although Madrigal, his first abstract painting, dates from 1949, when the Frosts were back living at 12 Quay Street, on the St. Ives seafront, it is the Cubist-inspired Walk along the Quay, painted the following year, that is regarded as his breakthrough, its bold composition dominated by semi-circles, interrupted by vertical linear areas of blue and khaki green. Walk Along the Quay is the first in a series of paintings, done on hardboard, that show an increasing confidence with abstraction. Another work from this period, Brown and Yellow (c1951-2), is in the Tate collection (although the Tate was initially slow to acquire a work by Frost). Many of his paintings from these years suggest draped fabrics, or the Cornish landscape with long fields terminating in angular cliff edges, as in Blue Winter (1956). Frost showed for three years with the St Ives Society of Artists, and was elected a member of the more progressive Penwith Society. For many years he made prints with Hugh Stoneman. During the 1950’s he exhibited regularly with the Leicester Galleries in London and also taught at Bath Academy, the University of Leeds, and in Cyprus. Although Frost joined the London Group in 1958, over the following decade a new generation of mostly London-based artist came to the fore. As sales of his work flagged, he ceased to show with the Waddington Gallery, and increasingly turned to teaching to help support the family, while continuing to pursue his own art. After Leeds, the Frosts moved to Banbury, Oxfordshire, where they lived between 1963 and 1974, with Terry lecturing at the University of Reading. In the early 1960’s he undertook a residency at San Jose in California, experimenting with new acrylic paints, and also teaching at the University of California. He showed in New York, beginning with the Barbara Schaeffer gallery in 1960, where he met Mark Rothko and other leading artists. In 1992, Frost was elected a Royal Academician and six years later was knighted. He and Kath had six children in all: five sons, Adrian, Anthony, Matthew, Stephen and Simon, and one daughter, Kate. Stephen is an actor, while Adrian and Anthony followed in their father’s footsteps as artists; Anthony still lives and working in St. Ives. When Alan Bowness was appointed director of Tate, he initiated the idea of a contemporary art museum in Cornwall, to celebrate the work of Frost, Heron, Hepworth and the many other artists who had forged a new approach to art in Britain in the 1950’s. When Tate St. Ives opened in 1993, a large banner by Frost, painted on Newlyn sailcloth, was displayed in the entrance. Terry Frost died in Cornwall in 2003. Twelve years later, on the centenary of his birth, a retrospective exhibition of his work was held at Tate St. Ives.
In the 1956 Smeaton Pier photograph are Terry and Kath Frost, flanked by their sons Adrian and Anthony. To their left is the poet and budding architect David Lewis, who had come to Britain from South Africa (the girl beside Lewis has not been identified). After moving to St. Ives, Lewis became secretary of the Penwith Society and promoter of the town’s artists. Like Frost, Mitchell, Hilton, Dorfman and others, he worked for a time as an assistant to Barbara Hepworth. In 1949, Lewis married Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham. However, seven years later he departed Cornwall, to study architecture in Leeds and to work with Peter Stead on modernist housing. This led to a new career in the United States, where he taught at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh and was a co-founder of Urban Design Associates (UDA). In 1985 Lewis was the catalyst for the retrospective exhibition St. Ives: 1939-64, at the Tate Gallery. Other photographs on that same contact sheet include shots of terraced granite houses on Back Road, and a Land Rover parked on Teetotal Street, where David Lewis lived at No. 4. A narrow thoroughfare, Teetotal Street has changed little over the years, although now it is littered with green wheelie bins. In another photograph, Kath and the girl stand beside a clinker-built boat drawn up on the solid granite setts of the pier; today the boats are gone, their place taken by brightly-coloured plastic surf boards. However surfing has been popular in Cornwall for many years, and in the summer of 1955, the beaches were thronged with holiday-makers, many of them carrying small plywood surfboards.
Terry Frost and Patrick Heron, in Heron’s studio on a later visit to St Ives, May 1959. Photograph by Adrian Flowers
Patrick Heron in his studio with unfinished Yellow Painting (now in Tate Collection) Visible in the background, Square Sun, January 1959 (National Galleries of Scotland) photograph by Adrian Flowers, May 1959.
Born on 30th January 1920 in Leeds, Patrick Heron was a multi-talented creative genius, equally at home painting, writing, lecturing, or engaging in polemical discussions. He first came to live in Cornwall as a young child, when his father Tom Heron (1890-1983), a Fabian Non-Conformist and member of the Leeds Art Club, spent several years in St. Ives, as manager and partner at the Cryséde Silk company. Founded by Alec George Walker in 1920, Cryséde produced block-printed textiles—many of them abstract patterns— for dress designers, using silk sourced from the Walker family firm in Yorkshire. After four years there was a falling-out with Walker and in 1929 Tom Heron moved to Welwyn Garden City, where he set up a new company, Cresta Silks, building a factory on Broad Water Road, and opening retail outlets, on Bond Street, Baker Street and Brompton Road. The distinctive modernist fronts and interiors of the Cresta shops were designed by the Canadian Wells Coates, while Edward McKnight Kauffer also designed for the company. While working as a designer for his father, Patrick Heron’s love of Cornwall, where he had spent idyllic days of his childhood, saw him returning frequently to St. Ives. In the late 1930’s, he enrolled at the Slade School of Art, but attended only two days a week, while continuing to design fabrics for Cresta Silks. Melon, his first design for a Cresta scarf dates from 1934, when he was fourteen years old, while his Amaryllis, dates from two years later. Paul Nash also produced designs for Cresta fabrics, including Cherry Orchard (1931), as did Graham Sutherland and Cedric Morris.
With the onset of WWII, and also being requisitioned for parachutes, Cresta turned to making utility clothing. Heron registered as a conscientious objector (as had his father in the First World War) and, although suffering from asthma, went to work as an agricultural labourer in Cambridgeshire. Ill health 1944-45 resulted in his being invalided. He returned to St. Ives, where he worked for a year at the Bernard Leach Pottery, admiring the works of Shoji Hamada, and meeting Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. After the war, he went back to work for Cresta Silks as head designer. Heron pursued his own career as a painter, and in 1947 had his first solo show. Nine years later, an exhibition of American Abstract Expressionist painting held in London marked a turning point in his career, inspiring him to move from working within a French Cubist and School of Paris style to one that showed the influence of the abstract painters of the United States. However Heron never lost that innate and instinctive love of colour and tactile surfaces, that derived both from his intimate knowledge of textile design and his enduring admiration for Bonnard and Matisse. While he pursued his career as an artist in Cornwall, the Cresta company continued to flourish and by 1973 there were 70 shops and over 1000 employees. After Tom Heron’s retirement, the company was taken over by Debenhams.
As an writer, Heron contributed essays and articles to the New Statesman, Art New York and other journals, using the opportunity to champion the work of his fellow St. Ives artists, including Peter Lanyon, William Scott, Bryan Wynter and Roger Hilton. In his 1955 book The Changing Forms of Art, the argument for abstraction was set out with characteristic passion. The following year, Heron and his wife Delia bought Eagle’s Nest, a large house overlooking Zennor, five miles west of St. Ives. For many years, the area around Zennor had attracted artists and writers, including DH Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and poet John Heath-Stubbs. Virginia Woolf spent her childhood summers at St. Ives, memories of which fill her novel To the Lighthouse. The artist Bryan Wynter lived nearby in Carn Cottage. The Herons settled in to Eagle’s Nest, welcoming fellow artists such as Roger Hilton and William Scott, and raising two daughters; Susanna, who went on to became a sculptor, and Katharine, now professor of architecture at Westminster University. Although Eagle’s Nest is a large house, Heron needed a separate workspace and so in 1958 moved his paints and canvases to the artists’ studios at Porthmeor. Other artists in the complex included Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and Terry Frost. The space Heron was allocated was No. 5, Ben Nicholson’s former studio, next door to Tony O’Malley. Although he remained an abstract painter for the rest of his life, Heron’s work retains memories of the Cornish landscape, small fields surrounded by stone walls, lopsided houses, and villages crowded around little coves. Through the 1970’s and 80’s, he continued to paint and write, achieving a legendary status both for artistic vision and idealism. A lifelong socialist and pacifist, he was involved in many activist campaigns to preserve the Cornish landscape. Heron received many accolades during his lifetime, but he declined both a knighthood, and the opportunity to become a member of the Royal Academy. He died at Eagles Nest in 1999.
In the Ember days, following Whitsun, May 17th 1959, the Flowers family; Adrian, Angela, and their two young children Adam and Matthew, travelled to St Ives for a short break. They stayed in a rented house at 6 Draycott Terrace. At the time Angela was pregnant with Daniel, who was born in August of that year. As always, work was combined with holiday. Adrian visited Patrick Heron at his Porthmeor studio, where several of the leading St Ives artists were based. Slim, in his late 20’s, and dressed in pullover and work trousers, Heron stands beside an unfinished large canvas as he is photographed. In one image he reaches out to touch the surface of the painting. This work is Yellow Painting (1958/59), now in the Tate Collection. The photograph shows the canvas some weeks before completion and reveals how Heron was using yellow, applied over mauve underpainting, to enhance the chromatic intensity of the work (an excellent description of Yellow Painting is given by Laura McLean-Ferris on the Tate website). During this period was moving towards the pure, soft-edged abstraction that would characterise his work in the early 1960s, while not letting go of the earthy, painterly quality of his canvases from the late 1950s with their embedded memories of landscape, stonewalls and hedges. In another photograph, Heron sits in a west country chair, looking at the camera, holding a large paintbrush. Although the photographs were taken using Kodak 120 colour negative film, the contact sheets were printed in black and white, with some colour prints. Today, No 5 studio has changed little, and still retains the wood-battened white walls, large skylight and bare floorboards that appear in the series of photographs taken by Flowers in 1959.
Patrick Heron in his studio, photograph by Adrian Flowers in May 1959
