Adrian Heath, born in Burma to English parents, came to London at the age of five. He first studied art at Newlyn School of Art, under Stanhope Forbes and in 1939 he attended the Slade School of Art. His studies were affected by the outbreak of World War II, upon which he joined the Royal Air Force and was held as a prisoner of war between 1942 and 1945. It was during this time that he met Terry Frost.
After the war he returned to the Slade, and it was during a visit to Cornwall in the 1950s that he met Ben Nicholson, and also associated with and was influenced by Victor Pasmore and Anthony Hill. In 1953 he published Abstract Art, its Origin and Meaning, which focused on the development of artistic abstraction, as its opening sentence outlines: 'there seems to be little understanding of the values of abstract painting and consequently no general appreciation of its qualities.'
Heath taught at a variety of universities such as Bath Academy of Art (1955-76) and the University of Reading (1980-85) and was artist in residence at the University of Sussex in 1969. From 1977 to 1980 he was a Senior Fellow at Glamorgan Institute of Higher Education. Heath's art holds a middle ground between abstraction and figuration, and later in life his art became freer and more fluid in style.
