Peter Lanyon
Born – St Ives, Cornwall, England 1918
Died – St Ives, Cornwall, England 1964
Peter Lanyon had, since the 1880s, been attracting the attention of artists who relished the light, land and seascape views of the Cornish town of St Ives. Lanyon, credited as a major painter of the St Ives School, attended the Penzance School of Art and, briefly, the Euston Road School in London. In 1939, the migration of artists to his locality brought him into contact with Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepwoth and Naum Gabo. This impacted on Lanyon’s work and he rejected landscape studies in favour of making abstract, three-dimensional constructions. These and his free-standing sculptures subsequently influenced the direction of his painting. His response combined together the romantic lyricism of the Cornish landscape and abstraction. With loose, expressive technique, he aimed to represent a spatial structure describing the complete experience of being in the landscape, rather than an observation from a single viewpoint. He exhibited his work in New York in 1959 and made friends with American Expressionists Kline and Rothko. Lost Mine dates from this time and has similar qualities to the work of his counterparts in the States. In the same year he took up gliding, literally giving a new angle on his landscape visions; it proved a fatal activity.
Masterpieces:
- Porthleven
- Bojewyan Farms
Text: The A-Z of Art, Nicola Hodge and Libby Anson.