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Lot Essay
Meteorologically speaking, a cloud base is the lowest altitude at which the visible portion of a cloud begins to form: the point at which rising warm air cools past the dew point and turns to visible moisture. For a glider pilot, it marks something more practical: the ceiling of usable lift, and the point beyond which the ground disappears from view. Peter Lanyon first experienced this world in 1959, when he began taking lessons at the Cornish Gliding Club at Perranporth, on the cliffs above the Atlantic. Painted three years later, at the height of his engagement with flight, Cloud Base (1962) stands among the most fully realised statements of the aerial landscapes that were born out of this escapade.
Gliding was not incidental to Lanyon’s art, but central to it. He had long been dissatisfied with the conventions of landscape painting: its insistence on a single, fixed viewpoint, and its reliance on linear perspective, a system of organising pictorial space, inherited from the Renaissance, in which depth is created through strict, mathematical illusion rather than felt experience. For Lanyon, this was a fundamentally dishonest way of rendering a landscape he knew to be in constant motion. Flight offered him the opportunity, both physically and pictorially, to break with this entirely.
‘I wasn’t satisfied with the tradition of painting landscape from one position only’, Lanyon said in 1963. ‘I wanted to bring together all my feelings about the landscape, and this meant breaking away from the usual method of representing space in a landscape painting—receding like a cone to a vanishing point. I wanted to find another way of organising the space in a picture. For me, a painting is not a flat surface. I’ve always believed that a painting gives an illusion of depth – things in it move backwards and forwards’ (recorded talk, 1963, quoted in Peter Lanyon: air, land & sea, exh. cat. Camden Arts Centre, London, 1992, p. 69).
This ambition is apparent throughout the present canvas’s handling. A pronounced diagonal division runs across the composition, separating two distinct pictorial registers: above, Lanyon builds the surface up in dense, textured passages, loading his brush heavily before cutting back into the wet paint with a blade, then dragging it further still with rags and his fingers, leaving a rough, pitted finish. Below, the paint runs thinner and smoother, the palette narrowing and the handling growing markedly more restrained. The result is a composition built on duality, where two registers are held in productive tension rather than resolved into a single, decipherable view. The artist’s inscription dates the work precisely to May 1962, a month in which Lanyon was working on the large Porthmeor Mural, commissioned by Stanley J. Seeger. The present work’s central motif—a diagonal, W-shaped structure—recurs at the left end of the mural, evidence of the close, cross-pollinating relationship between the two undertakings.
Cloud Base belongs to a tightly-knit sequence of major paintings from these years, among them Fly Away and Headwind (both 1961), painted in the immediate aftermath of the artist’s first flights. Across this body of work, J.M.W. Turner stood as an explicit reference point. Lanyon described his resolve ‘to get actually into the air itself and get a further sense of depth into yourself, as it were into your own body, and then carry it through into a painting. I think this is a further extension of what Turner is doing’ (radio programme with M. Canney and P. Feiler May, 1963, quoted in ibid., p. 69). Certainly, this is a lineage Cloud Base fulfils, its turbulent upper register recalling Turner’s own late storms and skies, dissolved almost to the point of abstraction.
Lanyon’s death in a gliding accident in 1964, barely two years after the completion of the present work, has inevitably coloured the reception of these late flight paintings, lending them a poignancy their maker could not have intended. Yet Cloud Base deserves to be judged first and foremost on its own formidable terms: as the fullest and most confident expression of Lanyon’s ambition to paint not the view from a single position, but the totality of a landscape experienced, physically and sometimes dangerously, from within.
Gliding was not incidental to Lanyon’s art, but central to it. He had long been dissatisfied with the conventions of landscape painting: its insistence on a single, fixed viewpoint, and its reliance on linear perspective, a system of organising pictorial space, inherited from the Renaissance, in which depth is created through strict, mathematical illusion rather than felt experience. For Lanyon, this was a fundamentally dishonest way of rendering a landscape he knew to be in constant motion. Flight offered him the opportunity, both physically and pictorially, to break with this entirely.
‘I wasn’t satisfied with the tradition of painting landscape from one position only’, Lanyon said in 1963. ‘I wanted to bring together all my feelings about the landscape, and this meant breaking away from the usual method of representing space in a landscape painting—receding like a cone to a vanishing point. I wanted to find another way of organising the space in a picture. For me, a painting is not a flat surface. I’ve always believed that a painting gives an illusion of depth – things in it move backwards and forwards’ (recorded talk, 1963, quoted in Peter Lanyon: air, land & sea, exh. cat. Camden Arts Centre, London, 1992, p. 69).
This ambition is apparent throughout the present canvas’s handling. A pronounced diagonal division runs across the composition, separating two distinct pictorial registers: above, Lanyon builds the surface up in dense, textured passages, loading his brush heavily before cutting back into the wet paint with a blade, then dragging it further still with rags and his fingers, leaving a rough, pitted finish. Below, the paint runs thinner and smoother, the palette narrowing and the handling growing markedly more restrained. The result is a composition built on duality, where two registers are held in productive tension rather than resolved into a single, decipherable view. The artist’s inscription dates the work precisely to May 1962, a month in which Lanyon was working on the large Porthmeor Mural, commissioned by Stanley J. Seeger. The present work’s central motif—a diagonal, W-shaped structure—recurs at the left end of the mural, evidence of the close, cross-pollinating relationship between the two undertakings.
Cloud Base belongs to a tightly-knit sequence of major paintings from these years, among them Fly Away and Headwind (both 1961), painted in the immediate aftermath of the artist’s first flights. Across this body of work, J.M.W. Turner stood as an explicit reference point. Lanyon described his resolve ‘to get actually into the air itself and get a further sense of depth into yourself, as it were into your own body, and then carry it through into a painting. I think this is a further extension of what Turner is doing’ (radio programme with M. Canney and P. Feiler May, 1963, quoted in ibid., p. 69). Certainly, this is a lineage Cloud Base fulfils, its turbulent upper register recalling Turner’s own late storms and skies, dissolved almost to the point of abstraction.
Lanyon’s death in a gliding accident in 1964, barely two years after the completion of the present work, has inevitably coloured the reception of these late flight paintings, lending them a poignancy their maker could not have intended. Yet Cloud Base deserves to be judged first and foremost on its own formidable terms: as the fullest and most confident expression of Lanyon’s ambition to paint not the view from a single position, but the totality of a landscape experienced, physically and sometimes dangerously, from within.