AS Byatt: the artist who helps me write

They may be ghostly, dizzying and ‘the opposite of stories’, but the novelist needs Patrick Heron’s abstract works to shape her fiction. Here she explains why she is so haunted by his work“Every great painter,” Patrick Heron wrote “has succeeded in projecting a new and wholly distinct species of pictorial space.” He was a great writer about art, vision and painting, and said he had had to give up writing criticism in case he became classified as a writer who painted as opposed to a