Peter Lanyon Part II :

England's most beloved painter

ART: Lanyon served the R.A.F. in North Africa, Palestine and Italy from 1940 to 1945 and suffered from migraine that prevented him from being a pilot which he would have preferred to serve with.

He was a pilot after being trained in 1959 which he did merely to taste the fullest possible experience of his surroundings. It gave him the aerial view which was later found in his paintings. The need of constant awareness of sound and movement on all sides along with the dangers of war intrigued him into his paintings.

In between his service, he was able to do a few drawings which had the image of war as a focal point. He painted "Ruins at Capua" in 1945. It was a strange painting in blues, greens and golden browns with an Italian influence.


EXHIBIT: Portheleven

In 1945 he was back in Cornwall where he settled down after marriage. He had the space he wanted after his stint with the R.A.F. By 1946, Lanyon started to concentrate on a developed theme through a relationship with landscape.

After a long and painful period abroad, Lanyon who was frequently in hostile surroundings, reverted to his identity with landscape to which belonged. After a time of worry and uncertainty, Lanyon had the feeling of reassurance through permanence and familiarity.

He settled to do a number of paintings that were completely abstract. However, the paintings reflected a certain universal move in English paintings.

He was proud to be English in representational form of art. I can for sure, based on looking over his paintings, say that Lanyon was one English painter who did not fall into the rut of English art that are always dull, drab and not appealing. The English have always failed to put passion into their painting.

It had always been static and uncompromising in what I have seen in their art centres, museums, books and in reproduction. But among them there were few who rose apart from this malachony set up and Lanyon was one who had caught my imagination.

Purity of thought

Lanyon used colour symbolically. For him red was connected with risk and danger. Yellow sexual connotation and white purity of thought and action. Rest of the colours were the connecting factors with these major colours and for Lanyon, it was a guideline for mix-ups. He felt landscape possessed specifically feminine character as revealed in his paintings. Even in abstract form, he used pinks, lemons and white.

Lanyon dared to make serious attack on the problem of diminution that tried to break the conventional relationship of things in the distance as seen by the painter. He paid greater attention to the needs of the picture than what his eyes met visually.

Peter Lanyon held his first exhibition in London in 1949. The largest exhibit was Cape Family which was 92 in. x 48in. Of this painting he explained how it represented a family that lived by the sea at a cape. He was determined to associate the family and the idea of generation and its continuity at the point where the sea and land surface meet.

It was a bold archetypal theme for which Lanyon had researched into primitive art and medieval illustrations and figures. It was so complex that Lanyon gave up such theories in abstract.

Search my heart on this painting; Cape Family, I for one, cannot comprehend this painting with its peaky little faces looking incongruous among the rocks and colour not strong enough to bind the large surface together.

After this painting, Lanyon gave up painting faces for a fuller and richer treatment of the figure as a whole. This is evident in many of his paintings later on. Towards the end of 1940s. Lanyon became fascinated by Nicholson's technique of scraping paint of the pictures and create interesting and varied textures.

However, this became a handicap which restricted his natural development as a colourist. As the breakthrough came once he realised where his art reflected, he was free and expansive in the use of paint which helped his achievement to a less private, if not less personal form of painting.

As he improved in his newly discovered technique, he was commissioned by the Arts Council in April 1950 to do a large painting. So, this was the turning point he had been waiting for. His exhibit, "Porthleven," measuring 45 inches by 60 inches was put at the Festival of Britain.

This was a form of recognition for Lanyon which stimulated a sudden independence devoid of the influence of Gabo and Nicholson though he had benefited enormously from their presence at St. Ives when he was a beginner.

Once he got the space to stretch out, he secured a grip on the feel of the place by working out a relationship with different parts in real space as that of a illusion of a real painter.

Challenge

There was no turning back for Lanyon. Every picture he painted was mysteriously beautiful touching the inner core of the person who looked at it. He invited people to read through what he had painted.

He threw a challenge to the complicated art of the contemporary and still later, modern art in fiery abstract. He left his signature in every art piece where the Brits could recognise instantly.

After a gliding accident, Peter Lanyon died on 31 August, 1964 when he was barely 46 years of age. Since mid-fifties, his paintings revealed a variety of invention with few parallel in recent English painting. His last works suggested that his creative power was rapidly intensifying at the time of his death.

English painters who tried their best to find new ways forward for English art within the context of modern movement, found Lanyon giving them the lead to such dreams.

This was at a time that Lanyon was fighting for recognition in an atmosphere of general distaste for advanced abstract art. It was tragic and very sad that he had to die at a time when wider public was embracing the value of such paintings to which Lanyon contributed magnificently and for the increased growth of recognition.

He was England's most appreciated and beloved painter of the modern era who infused an identity to his country.

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