Peter Lanyon (1918-1964)

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the historical and cultural references of Lanyon's earlier work fell away and his painting became increasingly focused on the artist's subjective phenomenological experience of place. He was fascinated by those liminal zones where the sea meets the land and the hills meet the sky. As early as 1948 he wrote that it was in such a situation as looking down from cliffs at the crashing, swirling sea hundreds of feet blow that a person 'realises he is seeing an image of his own existence' (Lanyon quoted in C. Stephens, Peter Lanyon at the Edge of Landscape, London, 2000, p. 152). He sought out extreme situations to extend his physical awareness of his environment and in 1959 he took up gliding. The sensation of flight added new dimensions to his landscape painting. His brush strokes became loser and more gestural and his compositions were increasingly abstract. The late works have an openness and fluency unlike the harder, crisper paintings of the post-war years.

The body as both the subject of that sensory experience and the catalyst to the evolution of the painting was central to Lanyon's late works. The confrontation of the fragile human body with the elemental forces of weather and the sea inevitably associated these works with the concept of the Sublime that had been a key component of the Romantic landscape tradition. Here is an image of an artist that recalls Turner lashed to the mast of a ship in order to fully experience a storm at sea. In painting mankind's encounter with nature, Lanyon implies the presence of a modern day equivalent to Richard Wilson's minuscule figures who contemplate the vastness of Snowdonia (ibid, pp. 146-55).