Patrick Heron, who died on Saturday, was one of the most important and influential English artists of the post-war era.
He won prominence not only through his brilliantly coloured abstract paintings, but also through his sometimes contentious writing as critic and commentator.
A charming and likeable man, he was also intellectually combative and fearlessly outspoken. He once argued trenchantly, for example, that the American Abstract Expressionists were at least as much inspired by British artists in Cornwall as vice versa.
Heron was one of a disparate group of painters who will always be indelibly associated with the "artists' colony" of St Ives.
Though born in Leeds in 1920, he spent several happy childhood years in Cornwall, including several months living in a beautiful house, Eagle's Nest, dramatically situated on a promontory above Zennor.
It was, remarkably, this house he returned to as an adult and bought in 1955 with his wife, Delia Reiss, and their two daughters, Katherine and Susanna.
His father, Tom Heron, was an exceptional individual. A Fabian and pacifist, he was involved in the textile industry. And he was a keen observer of developments in contemporary art.
Patrick produced designs for his firm, Cresta Silks, an activity that undoubtedly contributed to his painting being dismissed as purely decorative, a term of disparagement he regarded as a compliment.
For him the decorative is "the height of art . . . I defined decorative as the flawless organisation of the surface into terms which are instantly pleasurable to the eye."
During the war years he registered as a conscientious objector and went to work on a farm but, an asthma sufferer, quickly contracted pneumonia.
He reckoned that an invitation from the potter Bernard Leach to go and work in his studio in St Ives saved his life.
In 1950 he was sacked from his position as art critic of the New Statesman because an editor accused him of lecturing the readers about space every week.
But he continued to write elsewhere, and the influential American critic, Clement Greenberg, was an admirer of his work.
Critical of the insularity of British art, he was an enthusiastic champion of French painting, in particular its direct, sensual appreciation of the visual world.
When he said "I love all images and hate all symbols," he was preaching the primacy of the visual over literary interpretation.
Up to the mid-1950s, his own work, stylised interiors and still lifes, strongly reflected the influence of Matisse and Braque.
Then in 1956 came two decisive events. In January he saw and reviewed the exhibition "Modern Art in the United States" at the Tate, responding warmly to the Abstract Expressionists, and he and Delia moved into Eagle's Nest in the spring.
He later wrote: "The house in its setting is the source of all my painting."
When they arrived the azaleas and camellias were in bloom against the backdrop of moorland and sea.
The result was an explosion of colour in a series of kaleidoscopic Garden paintings.
These gave way to an extraordinary group of colour stripe paintings, just vertical or horizontal bands of colour.
They were, Heron later argued, the first stripe paintings. Whether that is true or not, they were certainly remarkable for their time, anticipating developments in US painting, and they still look remarkably fresh.
Then came more atmospheric compositions, using sequences of squares and discs against ground colour.
They have affinities with the work of several other painters, including William Scott, but they stand entirely on their own in their use of colour.
Then, by the mid-1960s, the softness gave way to simple, hard-edged arrangements of flat areas of intense, brilliant colour, a stylistic phase that lasted for more than a decade.
After Delia's sudden death in 1979 there was a hiatus in his work and when he resumed he never really matched the intensity of his earlier achievements.
But his white and lilac-coloured paintings of the 1990s, inspired by visits to Australia, exhibit something of the delight in the possibilities of painting that is a hallmark of his best work.
Last year's retrospective at London's Tate crowned a long, busy career.
The dominant emotion in his painting, he said in an interview with Martin Gayford at the time, was joy: "I do believe that one's awareness is saturated with visual pleasure . . . Looking at something, anything, is more interesting than doing anything else, ever.
"I could just sit in this chair for the rest of my life and be totally entertained."