Inspired by the work of the American Abstract Expressionists, and perhaps by the environment of his new home at Eagle’s Nest at Zennor in Cornwall, during the early 1960s Patrick Heron was moving away from depictions of more figurative subjects in order to concentrate on pure colour. Heron himself described colour as ‘both the subject and the means; the form and the content; the image and the meaning in my painting’ and noted that ‘we are still only at the beginning on our discovery and enjoyment of the superbly exciting facts of the world of colour’ (Patrick Heron, A Note on my Painting: 1962, catalogue of the Galerie Charles Lienhard Exhibition, Zurich, January 1963). The painter’s abstract works from around the late 1950s onwards are now seen as pioneering for their time, chiefly because of the manner in which their explorations of colour rarely spring from references to the physical world.

Heron’s paintings from the early 1960s enjoy a new compositional simplicity and decisive use of colour that seem to represent a break from his slightly earlier and ‘busier’ abstract works. Three Blues in Red is exemplary of the artist’s output from this period; his palette is reduced to two essential, opaque hues which emphasise the solidity and fundamental nature of three geometric forms. As was typical of Heron’s abstract compositional style in around 1961-62, these asymmetrically-positioned and ‘floating’ patches of colour also serve to imbue the painting with a powerful sense of structure and design. In describing the paradoxical and monumental nature of Heron’s abstract paintings dating from this time, Mel Gooding’s catalogue of the artist’s work relates how ‘their instinctive orderings of shape, colour and space, give them the movement and stillness, the gaiety and gravity of a free dance’ (Mel Gooding, Patrick Heron, London: Phaidon Press, 1994, p. 162).