Peter Lanyon (1918-1964) and Landscape Painting

British Council Collection

BBC, Your Paintings

Peter Lanyon, Dorset Green, 1958

Peter Lanyon in Dorset, Lulworth, 1956 see pages 168-171, Peter Lanyon: Modernism and the Land, by Andrew Causey

Lulworth

Peter Lanyon visited Czechoslovakia (Prague and Bratislava) in February 1964 (British Council exhibition British Painting 1900-1962).

According to Margaret Garlake, Peter Lanyon (Tate Publishing, 1998), he gave two lectures in Czechoslovakia, on modern English painters and English landscape painting.

"He spoke of his belief that landscape was the core of British painting and of his affinity with the United States".

In Lanyon's own words:

"The real place of the painter today in a landscape tradition is in the creation of works which transform the environment and fill people with images to understand the immense range of human curiosity in the sciences. Landscape then is not any longer tied specifically to 'nature' as the country, but infuses a painting with a sense of the forces beyond human scale"

From "Some Aspects of Modern British Painting: An Artist's Point of View", lecture typescript, 1964, quoted by Margaret Garlake.

I was fortunate enough to have an inspiring Peter Lanyon 'aerial' landscape painting from the British Council collection hanging in my office in Prague, where I served as Cultural Attaché and Director, British Council Czechoslovakia, during the 1980s.

I have always felt a special affinity for his work.

John Berger (1952) wrote of one of his paintings, "It is a painting, not of the appearance, but of the properties of a landscape" (quoted by Garlake, p. 10).

See also: Andrew Causey, Peter Lanyon

"For hours, Peter and I would talk in the studio, struggling to articulate not what the landscape looked like, but how to explore it inside and out, its rocks and fields and sea, its textures and saturations, its opacities and transparencies of colour, and how to experience it through art, not through representation but through the action of painting and making constructions."

W.S Graham , from The Nightfishing, Faber and Faber, 1955, reprinted in "St Ives, 1939-64", Tate Gallery Publications, 1985.

It sounds a little like Gerard Manley Hopkin's concepts of inscape and instress.

Tate St Ives, 2011 Exhibition (short video)


Soaring Flight, from some LANDSCAPES blog