Lot Essay
Andrew Causey (op.cit., p.31) writes 'several of the late pictures are collages, among them two gliding pictures, 'Glide Path' (collection: Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester) and 'Fistral (Bay)' (The latter ... named after a bay near Newquay, shows a broad open bay marked by a red horseshoe ... Two smaller, dark horseshoes rest on a horizontal red band which is like a glide track coming in across a calm sea. At the bottom an assortment of pieces of shaped polystyrene are stuck to the canvas as one might expect to find the discoveries of a beachcomber (which Lanyon was) arranged on a shelf or table. The sensuous reality revealed in the early gliding pictures was no longer satisfying on its own. In 'Fistral (Bay)' Lanyon attains both the sense of being high up and looking down over the sea along a wide sweep of coast, as well as the more tangible reality of the man on the ground who can pick up bits of junk and handle them. 'Glide Path' and 'Fistral (Bay)' and the other big collage paintings of 1964 have a papable, tactile presence which is both new in Lanyon's paintings, and at the same time looks back beyond the weather and early gliding paintings to the period of 'St Just' (1951)'.