Heron lands at the Tate

PATRICK HERON, the grand old man of British abstract art, took a break yesterday from supervising the hanging of canvases for a major retrospective exhibition of his work which opens at the Tate gallery, London, on Thursday, writes Tim Minogue. It features 80 of Heron's paintings, including some never shown before, from the still lifes, portraits and interiors of his early work of the 1940s to the huge, dazzlingly colourful abstracts of the 1980s and 1990s.

Patrick Heron, 78, is one of the leading figures of British 20th century art. He has spent most of his career in Cornwall, where he was one of the leading lights of the extraordinary artistic community of the Penwith peninsula which included Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Peter Lanyon and Roger Hilton. His use of colour is still exuberant. Colour, he once said, is "both the subject and the means, the form and content, the image and the meaning in my painting".

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