Peter Lanyon:

A genius in the world of arts

Gwen Herat

ART: Peter Lanyon could have been anything; a pianist, composer, sculptor, architect, but ended up as one of England’s celebrated painters. As a boy, he had so many privileges that others at his age could only dream of. His parents were wealthy and influential as well as talented musically. His father was a composer, pianist and an amateur photographer.

As a man with wide interests, he opened his home to all his friends and associates every Sunday for discussions of the arts and philosophy. It was in this ‘arty’ atmosphere that the young Lanyon grew.

He was sent to Clifton College where music master Douglas Fox to have his first lessons in music. Fox was a great friend of Lanyon senior who discovered the musical potential of his young sibling.

Peter Lanyon learned the piano and to the utter amazement of Fox, he played his own improvisations to the works of well-known composers. He enjoyed music and it was a pleasure but the young Lanyon had the urge to draw. He had a sense of the live presence of the landscapes surrounding and pressing in on mind. It was a feeling of a reality close to his heart which he failed to find in music.

By 1936, he had decided to study art and asked his father to send him to the local Penzance. He was already doing a course under Borlase Smart, the Cornish painter who was deeply impressed by his young charge. Smart was a marvellous artist with a no nonsense attitude and was tough and fascinated by the cliffs and open coast.

Smart concentrated on how Lanyon approached the solidity of the granite rocks and the rhythm of the waves battering the cliffs. Smart’s art school combined drawing from casts of antique sculptures which did not much appeal to Lanyon but he made the best of his training until he was discovered by Adrain Stokes.

He was a writer and critic on art and aesthetics who directed the young Lanyon to the Euston Road, the school of art in London. As he was not happy there, he lasted only for four months but was grateful for the experience gained such as the slow methodical procedure taught by William Coldstream in building up a picture.

It left a lasting impression on him and he learned the importance of creation of small marks out of which the images were gradually built. Though his saty was short-lived, he learned there were more logical and less agitated techniques.

Landscapes

By 1938, he was painting landscapes that were already his forte and very confident in handling of the paint. Lanyon was conscious of a growing discontent with what was in his immediate presence. He began to discover emotional involvement with landscape stronger than in his ability to translate other subjects into paint.

He was highly influenced by the changing seasons of England and their luscious environments. For instance, when he painted winter storms on cliff edges, they put pressure on his mind than he could absorb. Such were his emotional bearings.

Peter Lanyon was at St. Ives in 1918 and lived there most of his life apart from his boarding school and war services until his death in 1964. When he used to drive with his father from St. Ives to Land’s End, he discovered the further tip of Cornwall which was to be the source of inspiration for his future paintings.

The sea below, to the right and the road rising and falling with curves were visuals in his mind. Even at this tender age, he was able to mediate between the liquid and amorphous blues of the sea and sky on one side and on the other, green, greys and occasional yellow of the moorland. It became a sequence between him and nature like the cool-grey of the sky against the bright and the luminous.

The arabesque of colour and the rainbow overhead was what he was going to paint. As the artistic world was to see, Lanyon was able to put character on his subject and pervades his paintings but he was also able not to dominate them. He insisted he was a landscape painter and not an abstractionist. But without him realising; his landscapes were imbued with abstract quality.

As he grew older, a sense of philosophy held his grip on art. The endless motion of sea against rock surfaced the artistic obedience to laws of nature that evolved the human mind. He extracted energy from personal rapport with this conception.

The sea was like a spirit plodding at his conscience and directing his soul to seek satisfaction through art, the medium through which he could have expressed what was hidden in his mind. We see two sides to his artistic approach. Basically a nature painter, highly influenced by the environment of Cornwall, the beautiful countryside it contained.

No artist could have bypassed the scenic beauty and not experienced the emotional involvement it offered. The sea below land level at certain points, the lush green in virgin plots and the azure skies looking down upon her masses of flowers and trees. Next, we find Lanyon as a definite abstract painter, obsessed by the hard granite face of earth.

Lanyon carried out experiments under the influence of Naum Gabo, the exponent on abstract; wanted to reproduce weight of things on paper and explored tangible material without any commitment to the concepty of painting. Often, he smudged paint like a child but came up with fusions in vision that the normal art critic would have found difficult to calculate.

Though Lanyon claimed that he was a nature painter, he was to be proved wrong. Even nature was abstracted by his brush and years witness to his later paintings that were full of colour in arabesque designs.

He painted like a dreamer, throwinto wind the art he was trained to paint with. Innovative and imaginative, his paintings rose in different forms to what he saw. He would change the texture and concept of an idea come up with a total different vision.

Lanyon had the liberty to experiment and paint without the strain of marketing his art though they fetched exorbitant rates per piece. He had the luxury of a well provided life, hailing from a rich and influential family. So, he painted freely with no stress and pressure until he was called to serve in the Army.

To be continued

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