‘The Crafts in Relation to Contemporary Art’ by Patrick Heron

104-page manuscript book, written out in Chinese ink with gouache illustrations on Zerkall Hammered paper with light green eggshell endpapers and white Somerset card cover with off-white paper jacket. Completed in January 2021.

I have long been an admirer of Patrick Heron ever since first seeing an exhibition of his garden paintings at Tate St Ives in the early 2000’s. He wrote this essay as the basis for a talk he gave at the 1952 Dartington conference, at which Bernard Leach, Shoji Hamada and Soetsu Yanagi were significant figures. Having worked at the Leach Pottery in 1944-45, Heron was well placed to make the connection between painting and ceramics, arguing for a shared basis in organic, rhythmical abstraction in both disciplines.

I found Heron’s description of his own creative process particularly interesting, which he attributes to the onset of a certain set of physiological sensations: ‘a sudden access of energy in the pit of one’s stomach, in one’s arm, in one’s fingers’. For those of us struggling with execution, he is also reassuring in his view that, ‘The artist does not exist whose so-called vision is finer than his technique: everyone does the utmost he is capable of doing.’

However, while there is indeed some truth in his assertions about certain common forms between painting and ceramics, I am not entirely convinced by his association of Picasso and Braque with Leach and Hamada. It seems to me that there is something fundamentally different between a flat painting and a three-dimensional craft object - and that this is not only a difference that reflects the process of making, but represents a category difference between the objects themselves. Put simply, craft is not art, although it is certainly true that one can merge into the other to some extent.

Anyway, I wanted something substantial to work on during the long-extended COVID lockdown period and I suspect this may be my most extensive piece to date - certainly in terms of numbers of pages. I wrote this with many interruptions as it coincided with a particularly busy period when I was occupied with other things. This meant that I sometimes lost my thread. However, it was reassuring in a way to return to the project after each break, although I found that the early stages were easier, but the closer I got to the end, the more mistakes I made. I managed to rewrite those pages with the most egregious errors, but in the end had to put up with the many infelicities that handwork inevitably seems to entail. But perhaps this is its essential charm?