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Ensayo del lote
As St Ives grew into a thriving artistic colony after the Second World War, Peter Lanyon remained determined to assert his Cornish identity: ‘I am CORNISH BOTH SIDES and that means inside & outside’ (the artist’s letter to Lady Mander, 5 May 1958). This conviction translated into his landscape painting, a process that started well before he picked up his paintbrush. In an attempt to ‘feel’ the landscape, Lanyon’s students described the unusual experience of working with the artist, encountering the landscape in all weathers, lying on cliff edges, touching it, looking at it upside down, and trying to catch a view of the landscape behind him ‘unawares’. His approach encouraged an embodied engagement with landscape painting, his abstract canvases capturing the experience of inhabiting the landscape.
Monumental in scale, Headwater transforms the Cornish landscape into a dynamic field of shifting forms and energies. Sweeping passages of black pigment carve up the composition, forming arcs and horizontals that suggest a hilltop, wave or horizon line. Passages of familiar blues and earthy browns give way to, and overlap with, vivid oranges and purples that resist literal interpretation. With no single focal point dominating the composition, overlapping planes, calligraphic linear passages and fragmented zones of colour create a continually shifting space that resists stable orientation. The result is a landscape experienced in motion rather than from a fixed viewpoint. The viewer is invited to navigate the work physically, mirroring the artist's own movement through the landscape. As John Berger observed, Lanyon painted ‘not the appearance, but the properties of a landscape: properties only discovered when one knows a place so well that its ordinary scenic appearance is long forgotten. (J. Berger, quoted in M. Garlake, The Drawings of Peter Lanyon, Aldershot, 2003, p. 5). Here, abstraction becomes not a retreat from nature but a means of conveying the complexity, energy and lived experience of the West Penwith landscape.
The present gouache is considered part of a small series of large-scale works on paper produced in preparation for Peter Lanyon’s important 1962 commission from the American collector Stanley J. Seeger. An avid supporter of the artist’s work since 1957, Seeger invited Lanyon to visit his house, Bois d’Arc, in Texas, a trip that is thought to have encouraged the brighter colour palette evident in works of this period. Following his visit, Lanyon produced three full-scale gouache and ink designs exploring possibilities for a monumental painting intended for the music room. The commission was so ambitious in scale that Lanyon moved into No. 3 Porthmeor Studios, St Ives, to complete the final work.
The critic Lawrence Alloway described Lanyon as ‘our last landscape painter’, who regarded the genre as a ‘valid and successful starting point’, looking back to the rich tradition of British landscape painting while drawing upon the post-war vogue for abstraction (R. Alloway, quoted in exhibition catalogue, European Artists Today: Thirty Five Painters and Sculptors, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1959, p. 46). Yet, rather than a British painter, Lanyon perhaps wished to be characterised as a ‘true Cornishman’. He did not paint pictures of the landscape; his paintings were the landscape in action. It was as if his brushes, laden with liquid pigment, embodied the collisions of sea, wind and cloud, while the surfaces on which he painted became the granite core of the land. Each painting and drawing unfolds as an intense drama, a surge of form, texture and colour in motion.
Monumental in scale, Headwater transforms the Cornish landscape into a dynamic field of shifting forms and energies. Sweeping passages of black pigment carve up the composition, forming arcs and horizontals that suggest a hilltop, wave or horizon line. Passages of familiar blues and earthy browns give way to, and overlap with, vivid oranges and purples that resist literal interpretation. With no single focal point dominating the composition, overlapping planes, calligraphic linear passages and fragmented zones of colour create a continually shifting space that resists stable orientation. The result is a landscape experienced in motion rather than from a fixed viewpoint. The viewer is invited to navigate the work physically, mirroring the artist's own movement through the landscape. As John Berger observed, Lanyon painted ‘not the appearance, but the properties of a landscape: properties only discovered when one knows a place so well that its ordinary scenic appearance is long forgotten. (J. Berger, quoted in M. Garlake, The Drawings of Peter Lanyon, Aldershot, 2003, p. 5). Here, abstraction becomes not a retreat from nature but a means of conveying the complexity, energy and lived experience of the West Penwith landscape.
The present gouache is considered part of a small series of large-scale works on paper produced in preparation for Peter Lanyon’s important 1962 commission from the American collector Stanley J. Seeger. An avid supporter of the artist’s work since 1957, Seeger invited Lanyon to visit his house, Bois d’Arc, in Texas, a trip that is thought to have encouraged the brighter colour palette evident in works of this period. Following his visit, Lanyon produced three full-scale gouache and ink designs exploring possibilities for a monumental painting intended for the music room. The commission was so ambitious in scale that Lanyon moved into No. 3 Porthmeor Studios, St Ives, to complete the final work.
The critic Lawrence Alloway described Lanyon as ‘our last landscape painter’, who regarded the genre as a ‘valid and successful starting point’, looking back to the rich tradition of British landscape painting while drawing upon the post-war vogue for abstraction (R. Alloway, quoted in exhibition catalogue, European Artists Today: Thirty Five Painters and Sculptors, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1959, p. 46). Yet, rather than a British painter, Lanyon perhaps wished to be characterised as a ‘true Cornishman’. He did not paint pictures of the landscape; his paintings were the landscape in action. It was as if his brushes, laden with liquid pigment, embodied the collisions of sea, wind and cloud, while the surfaces on which he painted became the granite core of the land. Each painting and drawing unfolds as an intense drama, a surge of form, texture and colour in motion.