Big Painting Sculpture

I sometimes walk past this sculpture. It's Art with a purpose -- to act as a windbreak between the two tower blocks that frame the passageway.

It really is called Big Painting Sculpture. The artist is Patrick Heron.

Here is an extract from an article in The Independent about the sculpture, written before Patrick Heron's death in 1999

"Controlling the wind was not an alien concept to Heron or his son-in- law architect, Julian Feary, who collaborated on the project. Living, as he does, on a clifftop in Cornwall, wind-breaking devices have been of concern to Heron for the past 50 years. The challenge was to design a structure that would slow the wind down without itself being blown down, a process that extended to tests in a wind tunnel in Oxford. Feary was impressed by the Oxford engineers' "poetic response" to the project. "They referred to Patrick's shapes as clouds," he says.

Heron, who is 78, is keen to credit his son-in-law as "the genius behind all this", saying: "He's the one who realised the squiggles in solid form and made the discs float." Feary in turn believes that "Patrick did what only he could do as an artist and I did what I can do as an architect. While he's working with his Japanese watercolour brush on a piece of watercolour paper, it's my responsibility to take something that's maybe two or three centimetres high and make it five metres". The sculpture could not have been made two years ago, without the use of digital technology both in design and manufacturing, he added.

Among the colours selected by Heron for the discs were his favourites - lemon yellow, cobalt violet, cadmium red, ultramarine blue and cerulean blue - although he hastens to add: "All colour is madly exciting as far as I'm concerned." In order to match Heron's precise shades, the colours were mixed specially. The discs were made by Northshore Composites, a specialist supplier which manufactures yachts."