By the end of the 1950s Patrick Heron had established himself as one of the most avant-garde painters working in Britain and which was to lead to international recognition as one of the foremost abstract artists of the post-war period. In 1962, the year before the present work, he had held his second solo exhibition in New York at the Bertha Shaefer Gallery and was at the forefront of the ongoing dialogue that flowed between the American Abstract Expressionists and his British contemporaries such as William Scott, Alan Davie and Peter Lanyon.

Critically engaged and always exploring formal concepts concerning the colour and structure of his work, one can trace discernible groupings in Heron’s paintings of the 1950s as his ideas evolved. Paintings such as Yellow Painting: October 1958 -May/June 1959 (Tate, London) at the close of the decade achieved a formidable complexity and richness. However, in the early 1960s, his paintings become simpler again, with reduced numbers of forms, and little overpainting and re-working. Initially this happened through one colour becoming dominant and steadily encroaching upon the others, as in Black Painting - Red, Brown, Olive: July 1959 (private collects ion), which was awarded that year's Grand Prize at the John Moores Exhibition. As the numbers of forms lessened, so the layering of colours also diminished and in works such as the present, we see Heron limit himself to nearly a single colour range. Restricting the palette in this way ensured that the weight of the forms was not overwhelmed by the contrast of the colours, rather that the differing tones worked together to define and place the forms within the picture plane. Heron’s refusal to draw perfect circles or straight lines, "unlike Ben Nicholson I have never In my life drawn a straight line or a purely circular circle or disc" (Heron quoted in Mel Gooding, Patrick Heron, Phaidon Press, London, p.184) combined with the clearly visible brushwork animates the surface and engages the eye.

Commenting on works of this period, Mel Gooding described how their visual dynamics, "invite the eye and the mind to play in the field contained by their physical limits. Their appeal is directly sensational; they have no symbolic burden, they make no deliberate allusions to things in the world, they invite no particular associations." And yet, as Gooding continues, we are still free to draw our allusions. “Colour is inevitably evocative; its intensities and hues are described by terms that have other dimensions of meaning: deep, dark, light, cool, hot; shapes have differing relations of contiguity: they nudge, collide, intrude or invade, hover above or below, envelope; a floating disc recalls sun or moon; a rectangle of colour suggests a window. These images are occasions for memory and recognition; lacking denotation they call forth a language rich in connotations, a language not of the relationship between things but of relationships per se. In this sense, and in this sense only, the formal relations of colour and shape in these paintings are metaphorical.” (M. Gooding, Patrick Heron, London, 1994, p.175.)

As the 1960s progressed, Heron would reintroduce stronger and more contrasting colours, and explore the points at which these colours met, but in Blue November Painting : 1963 we see Heron working at a point where he relishes the challenge of bringing together a purity of intention and imagination using only restricted means.