To make Orange, yellow, dull green and white : August 1965, Patrick Heron started with an outline drawing made with charcoal. Using the technique he adopted in early 1963, the composition was decided before painting began. Remnants of the charcoal drawing are visible at the edge of the spherical white areas, which are unpainted, and it shows that Heron determined the rippling outlines of his design with considerable precision. In 1962, Heron claimed that ‘[c]olour is both the subject and the means’, and he often titled paintings according to the colours they contained, thereby suggesting that each colour alone was distinct and qualitative. He regarded colour as the principal ingredient in art, and derived endless visual interest from its ‘varied and contrasting intensities, opacities, transparencies; the seeming density and weight, warmth, coolness, vibrancy’. In the mid-sixties, his colour experiments frequently involved a narrow chromatic range of red, vermilion and brown, or stark juxtapositions of complementary colour, as with the area of ‘dull green’ interposed between areas of orange and yellow in this painting. A similar colour experiment was performed in Orange and Lemon with White : 1965 (University of Warwick), which uses the same colours but without ‘dull green’. Heron’s aim was to achieve balance and visual tension between the constituent ‘area-shapes’ of colour. He regarded art as a narrow formal activity and said: ‘I can dwell endlessly on the magical realness of […] superbly satisfying areas of colour—with merely their purely physical nature to contemplate.’

The shape of Heron’s design in Orange, yellow, dull green and white : August 1965 has some resemblance to a coastal landscape, or a schematic, map-like description of one. This is despite protesting that he was ‘no landscape painter in disguise’. The contours are created by subtle deviations around a straight line, so that they seem to pulse, much like the irregular lines of a cliff formed by a natural process of tidal erosion. The circle and three-quarter circle are globular and planet-like, and they suggest a development from the geometrically precise circles of Heron’s friend and one-time St Ives neighbour Ben Nicholson. Most distinctively, Heron’s design includes narrow, stripe-like bands of colour at the edges of the canvas. They emphasise and frame the limits of the rectangular tableau, and contrast with neighbouring areas of expansive, block-like areas-shapes, which they project from like piers.

The stylistic progression of Heron’s work between 1956 and the mid-sixties was a significant episode in the development of abstract painting in Britain, and it marked him as one of the most searching, independent painters of his generation. In his earliest mature phase between 1949 and 1956, Heron used a cubist style—partly developed from Georges Braques—in which he treated a range of subjects including portraits, still life and interiors. A break occurred in January 1956 shortly before he moved from London to live in Cornwall, and he began making non-representational paintings in a painterly idiom that reconciled aspects of American colour field painting and French tachisme. To begin with, several significant paintings treated landscape themes as with Azalea Garden : May 1956 (Tate). In 1957 and 1958, Heron made several paintings composed exclusively from vertical or horizontal bands of colour, and from these he began to form painterly, soft-edged, irregular squares and circles. These gradually achieved greater definition in the years leading up to 1963. In that year, Heron began to produce paintings in a definitive idiom that he continued to use until the late seventies. This was the idiom in which he made Orange, yellow, dull green and white : August 1965.

In ‘A Note on My Painting : 1962’, Heron summarised his artistic concerns at that time: ‘For a very long time now, I have realized that my over-riding interest is colour. Colour is both the subject and the means; the form and the content; the image and the meaning, in my paintings today.’ Writing more generally about the state of art, he declared: ‘Painting has still a continent left to explore, in the direction of colour (and in no other direction).’ Up to that point, Heron had used wet-on-wet painting and autographic brushwork to soften the edge of shapes in his paintings. Shortly after making this statement, however, he renewed his interest in mapping the shape of colour forms. He began to divide the canvas with preliminary charcoal outlines, first doing so in Rectilinear Reds and Blues : 1963 (The Box, Plymouth). As a result, the edges of those forms became clearly defined rippling frontiers. Simultaneously, his brushwork became much finer. Although the action of the brush is still discernible in the paint surface of Orange, yellow, dull green and white : August 1965, brush marks are woven together with a large number of similarly even, loaded applications of paint. In consequence, the paint surface became more substantial and less porous, and the colour of shapes has an intangible presence that seems supervenient to the paint it is composed from.