Patrick Heron was one of the leading painters of his generation and one of my artist heroes. Like me, Heron also had artist heroes. His were chosen from the great French Post-Impressionist painters; namely Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cezanne, Georges Braque and Henri Matisse and the influence of each artist can be seen in many, if not all, of Heron’s paintings.

Henri Matisse, L’Atelier Rouge, Oil on canvas, 181 x 220 cms, Painted in 1911. Collection MOMA New York
Heron first saw this picture during the war in a basement gallery in London, it was for sale at £600 and was bought on behalf of the American collector Mrs Simon Guggenheim who later bequeathed it to MOMA. Heron did not have the money to buy it, however it made such an impression on him that he visited the gallery every day until it was finally sold.

Matisse, as the master of colour, was the inspiration and guide for Heron’s use of colour throughout his professional career. Heron knew Braque and describes a visit to his studio where he saw something completely new to him – an artist working on multiple pictures all at the same time. He speaks of watching while Braque frugally uses up any left-over paint by flitting from picture to picture to find the best location for every tiny dot of colour. Heron considered Bonnard an under-appreciated, semi-abstract painter artist and his mastery of the figure and its importance to a composition was a great influence on Heron’s art throughout the 1940’s and 50’s. Cezanne’s landscapes, when transferred to the scenery of Cornwall, also provided constant inspiration.

Some early drawings and watercolours by the young Patrick Heron aged from 3-8 years old

Heron himself was somewhat of a child prodigy. At the age of three he was making very competent landscape and figure drawings. By five he was almost up to Art School standard. His artistic and enlightened parents eased the burden on Heron’s school teachers by telling them not to worry too much about teaching him anything – he was going to be an artist anyway so he should be left to focus on that. At his secondary school near Harpenden he was indeed left to his own devices. His art teachers could no longer teach him anything and so he painted all day and so was largely self-taught.

Bedroom Mousehole, Cornwall. Signed and dated 1946, Oil on canvas, 76 x 63 cms
Sold in 2018 for 120,000 Euro.
Exhibited at Heron’s first one man show at the Redfern in 1947,

Cornwall was a great influence on Heron. Having first visited there as a child, the family later moved to Hertfordshire where they founded Cresta – a firm of silk printers where Heron helped out by designing scarves aged just 14. He finally returned to Cornwall due to the Second World War. A conscientious objector like his parents, Heron was allowed to go down to Cornwall to work with the potter Bernard Leach; an extraordinary piece of good fortune as Heron was not only able to hone his artistic skills by making pots, he also thrived under the watchful tutelage of Leach. He continued to paint throughout the war and afterwards in 1947 he had his first one-man show at The Redfern Gallery in London.

Blue Table with Window, Signed and dated 1954,
Oil on canvas, 102 x 127 cms
Sold in 2011 for £ 1,049,250 , current auction record price.

Heron was by now spending every summer in Cornwall and a clear transition from figurative painting to pure abstract began through the late 1940’s and 1950’s, always edging nearer to pure colour. This culminated in 1956/57 when he bought ‘Eagles Nest’, a cliff top house near St Ives, which he first saw as a child. Here in Cornwall he paints, ‘Interior Garden Window’ – his final major narrative painting, and then begins a new chapter with the pure abstract ‘Camellia Garden’. Everything thereafter is abstract and all about colour, light and shapes.

Interior with Garden Window , circa 1955/1956,
Oil canvas, 121 x 152 cms. Collection Tate Britain
Heron’s last narrative painting before becoming a totally abstract painter

Watching Heron’s work ethic on film is exhausting. He is either out walking miles every day or painting long hours in Ben Nicholson’s old studio in St. Ives. He can be seen working on a large canvas, almost the size of a bedroom wall. It takes 13 hours straight to fill in the spaces using paint straight from the tube and he works without stopping, explaining that should he take a break then the paint will dry and a mark or ridge will appear where he left off and spoil the picture.

Camellia Garden, March. Signed and dated 1956, oil on canvas, 182 x 91 cms
Sold 2008 for £668,450
Herons first solely abstract painting following directly on from ‘Interior with Garden Window’

From my selection of images, I hope you can see the transition from semi-narrative to pure abstract and the energy and the warmth that comes through from Heron’s exceptional art.

Atmospheric Strata, Feb 1958. Oil on canvas, 122 x 56 cms. Sold 2013 £626,000
One of a relative rare series of very attractive and commercially successful ‘stripe’ paintings

Heron was successful right from his first show in 1947 and in 1985 he was honoured with a retrospective exhibition at the Barbican, which is probably the largest assembly of his works. His prices remained constant for many years until in 2006 they spiked. Prices continued to rise until 2009, when they settled back down a little, but remained strong for Masterworks from both pre and post 1957 eras.

Patrick Heron would have been 100 this year and I am sure that if he were still alive and able to paint, he would be making art as energetically now as he was throughout his amazing career.

Bridget Riley, Bassacs, ’94 (section), signed and dated 94, gouache on paper, 66 x 87 cms. Sold Nov 2019, £250,000

It is impossible not to be moved both spiritually and physically while standing in front of a major work by Bridget Riley. She belongs to a painting movement known as ‘Op Art’.

Bridget Riley – Shift, 1963. Oil on canvas, 75 x 75 cms. Sold twice recently in London, June 2016, £1,426,500 and then February 2020, £2,715,000

Not to be confused with Pop Art, Op Art is short for Optical Art, a style of visual art that uses optical illusions and effects with the aim of destabilising the viewer. The viewer gets the impression of movement, hidden images, flashing and vibrating patterns or of swelling and warping. The movement emerges in the 1960’s and includes other major International artists such as Victor Vasarely and Jesus Rafael Soto.

Bridget Riley – Primitive Blaze, emulsion on board, 1963, 94 x 94 cms.
Sold June 2007 for £826,400

Just try standing directly in front of a Riley work, especially a large 60’s black and white piece. It truly is a unique experience. After a few seconds you begin to feel woozy, then you begin to feel like you are being pulled into the picture itself and so you begin to move involuntarily and to sway gently to gain access, and then your eyes go fuzzy. This effect all comes from the artist’s specific design and her precise aim is to make this happen to you.

Bridget Riley – Chant 2, 1967, Emulsion on canvas, 231 x 231 cms. Sold July 2008, £2,561,250

Bridget Riley uses a studio system to make her pieces; she makes the original design and then her super skilled team produce the finished pictures under her direct supervision throughout. Her distinctive way of working owes little to other artists and her skill, knowledge and experience now spans over 50 years as a working artist. By using a studio method with teams of people who will carry out her ideas and put them into practice means she is freed up to constantly have new ideas and to refresh her art and output.

Bridget Riley – Study fo Point Movement, signed, gouache on card, 68 x 73 cms. Sold Nov 2017, £162,000

I love the sheer precision of her work and also the variety, and I marvel at how she manages to always make it undoubtedly recognisable as the work of Bridget Riley. The most desirable and expensive pieces are the black-and-white works which span the early 60’s from 1961-1964. These culminate in the 1965 exhibition ‘ The Responsive Eye’ held at MOMA New York, when ‘Current’ 1964, by Riley was selected for the front cover of the catalogue.

Bridget Riley – October 5, Revision of August 11, signed and dated 98, gouache on paper, 85 x 56 cms. Sold March 2020, £125,000

Colour works begin to emerge from 1967 onwards and are inspired by places Riley knows or has visited. For example, the ‘Ka’ and ‘Ra’ series relate to her visits to Egypt and evoke the colours, shapes and light in Egypt. The series, ‘Les Bassacs’ is inspired and named after the village of the same name in Provence, near to where Riley has her studio.

Bridget Riley, Bassacs, ’94 (section), signed and dated 94, gouache on paper, 66 x 87 cms. Sold Nov 2019, £250,000

For collectors there is much to choose from; an easy and affordable starting point being the many limited-edition prints, followed by works on paper and then paintings. The big money has until recently been for the 60’s black and white works only which inevitably are now very rare, so in recent years large scale colour works from the 70’s and 80’s and later have increased in price significantly.

Bridget Riley – Serpentine Study, 1999, gouache on paper, 39 x 38 cms
Sold Oct 2019, £50,000

For me, the genius of Bridget Riley is that her work never dates and is always fresh and vibrant in its intensity and vision.

Bridget Riley – Six Circles, gouache, 1970, 79 x 45 cms. Sold June 2018, £125,000

Of all the figurative painters working today, few if any can match George Condo’s CV for artistic heritage and bragging rights. He worked for Andy Warhol in the ‘Factory’, jammed with and was a friend to Basquiat and now designs albums for Kanye West and handbags for Kim Kardashian.

The Queen, by Condo the work is called ‘Dreams and Nightmares of the Queen’ 2006

Born in Concord, New Hampshire, USA in 1957 Condo’s work spans nearly four decades. He studied Art History and Music at Lowell in Massachusetts before moving to Boston where he worked in a screen-printing shop. He joined a band in Boston called ‘The Girls’, through which he met Basquiat in 1979 while performing on the same bill in his band ‘Gray’. Long story short, Basquiat persuaded Condo to move to NY in 1980 and the rest is history. Condo’s previous screen-printing experience got him the gig in the ‘Factory’ working for Andy Warhol. He worked there for nine months and reportedly only met Warhol once. He was also involved with ‘diamond dusting’ pictures as well as silkscreen-printing. Andy Warhol subsequently bought several paintings from one of Condo’s first NY shows in the early 80’s.

Nude and Forms, the current world record holder, sold at Christie’s NY May 2018, for $6.6 million

Both Warhol and Basquiat where strong artistic influences on Condo’s work at this time. However, over above these two as he emerged as a figurative painter, was and still is, Picasso. A key difference is that unlike Picasso who painted figurative images of real people and things, Condo’s images all emerge from his imagination. In an interview with the Guardian in 2013 he is quoted as saying ‘I describe what I do as Psychological Cubism. Picasso paints the violin from four different perspectives at one moment. I do the same with psychological states; four of them can occur simultaneously. Like glimpsing a bus with one passenger howling over a joke they’re hearing down the phone, someone else asleep, someone else crying – I’ll put them all in one face”.

‘Day of the Idol’ photo courtesy of Sotheby’s, sold twice, Sotheby’s NY May, 2018, $2.7 million , then again at Christie’s NY, November 2019, for $ 3.7 million.

He’s also influenced by old master painters such as Rembrandt and Degas. The colour field and abstract painters such as deKooning and Rothko and will add in elements and colours from these artist’s work into his.

It was Condo who painted Kanye West’s 2013 Christmas gift to Kim – a Hermes Birkin bag featuring three nude women and an angry green monster. Not quite what the couple were expecting, it was once rumoured to have been destroyed. When inevitably it was posted on Instagram, followers were not amused, ‘holy shit balls that’s ugly ‘ said one!

Hermes Birkin exclusive design by George Condo – gifted by Kanye West to Kim Kardashian

Condo moved to Cologne and then Paris where he spent 10 years between 1985 and 1995 remaining entirely focused on imaginary characters until the 2000’s. In 2006 he painted a portrait of the Queen, who has a long neck, gerbil like cheeks and a Crown and he also did the five interchangeable covers for Kanye West’s 2010 album (My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy), one of which appears to depict Kanye naked and straddled by a winged naked female. Prior to this, his imaginary characters would have multiple pairs of eyes, teeth and all sorts of other ‘additions’. Ralph Rugoff, the curator of the 2011 Hayward Gallery Condo retrospective show wrote that Condo’s portraits amounted to an ‘anatomical orgy’.

Red Head sold Philips NY in May 2018 for $ 1.5 million

The Art Market’s response to Condo’s work exploded during the Spring/ Summer sales of 2017 to the same period in 2018. Condo had become perhaps the most coveted artist on the secondary market in those 12 months, thanks to both the tiny quantity of his output and a belief that buying his work was a surefire investment that could or should pay off. Over the 2017/18 period Condo, set and broke his own record at auction three times.