When Matthew Lanyon died in 2016 it was unexpected, and was only weeks after the private view of an important exhibition of his work at New Craftsman Gallery St Ives. I spoke with him that opening night and he was as enigmatic and intriguing as always, a curious mix of shyness and lively intellectualism. He was already one of Cornwall’s most important artists, and the show was perhaps among his most personal, as much of the work addressed the recent loss of his mother, her legacy, and the love he felt for her. It was typical of Matthew to put so much of himself into his work, and so the archive of paintings, prints, assemblages and tapestries he left give us insight into the story of his life, from his childhood as the son of acclaimed British Modernist Peter Lanyon, to his own experiences as a lover, husband, father and artist. Every work, in whatever medium, is defined by an exclusive visual language which explores abstraction in the context of the history and landscape of West Cornwall, where he was born and raised.
'Pasiphae'
Matthew’s long association with New Craftsman Gallery continues this autumn, with the first curated exhibition of his work since 2018. Titled Matthew Lanyon: No Holds Barred, Life & Art, it celebrates the work of a man for whom distinctions between art and life were largely irrelevant. “Everything Matthew did was ‘to the next level’ and held meaning and purpose,” says his wife Judith, who is now director of his archive and producer of the recent award-winning documentary film profiling his life. “His home and working environments were built by hand in the same breath of daily reverence and love as the artworks he made,” she says. “With his partner and baby son he built a home from an old barn. It was a long and exhausting task, and he followed it by building a Cornish hedge, about 66 metres long, along the property boundary. This became a monumental achievement in his own sense of his life’s work – just one man, a huge quantity of rocks and a wheelbarrow.”
This total dedication to the creative task in hand came to define Matthew, both as a person and an artist. “He forged his own path and tied himself in knots sometimes,” says Judith, “and he created art to express his own feelings and experiences about places, people and living creatures.” Matthew was born in 1951, one of six children, and saw his beloved Cornwall change significantly throughout the second half of the 20th century. As Judith explains, “he was wary of the pitfalls of art tourism and was bitter about mass road building in the 1980s, and indeed anything which invaded the natural peace of Cornwall. And yet, there was not an ounce of Cornish nationalism about him, even when he was making work rooted in protest. He welcomed everyone who was interested, he adapted quickly to change, and he loved science and technology, particularly tools and machines that worked.”
Matthew Lanyon with his painting Bartinney Landing 2002
He was also a man constantly brimming with thoughts and ideas, and a desire to share them. “He wrote to NASA once,” says Judith, “with an idea for a novel way of going into space with binder twine – and they wrote back. He called himself many things: the first poet to orbit the earth in a good mood, one small man, and most controversially perhaps, given his heritage, the King of Cornwall. He was funny as hell. He was, as all the many people who loved him know, quite extraordinary.” Matthew’s paintings, often monumental in size, “could be interpreted as maps, or trails through time and space, with all the suns rising and setting around the edges, always celebrating the sacred in both joy and loss,” writes Judith in her notes for the New Craftsman exhibition. “He was attracted in his work to the edges of things, the unexpected transformation and collapse of worlds, the threats to life posed by human vanity and the elements. [For Matthew], painting was sometimes like a rain dance or a prayer – an attempt to ward off danger.”
'The Crack'
Matthew read widely, reaching back into antiquity and myth for inspiration beyond the painting traditions of Western art and his Cornish contemporaries. He had an appetite for Greek mythology, fascinated by the way it helped shape Western consciousness, and his paintings often bear the names of Greek goddesses and relate on a symbolic level to their surviving abduction, using magic, delivering punishments and being sexually irresistible, each painting reflecting personal aspects of Matthew’s life. Pasiphae and the white bull; the motherless Athena, goddess of wisdom, strategy and craftsmanship; and Pyrrha, tasked with re-populating the earth after the deluge brought about by Zeus, are all referenced in this show, as well as the timeless subject of Europa and the bull. He made 20 Europa paintings between 2001 and 2011, and this exhibition includes the very first work in that series. Alongside his art, Matthew had a delight in expressing his thoughts through language. He wrote liberally on the walls of his studio and filled books with endless, extraordinary notes. In 2005 he wrote, ‘Door wide to a pagan wind, stories of Minoan Crete sit well in the provocative uplands where I work, and the image of the girl and the bull has been a constant for over a decade. Men changed into animals and heroes going about changing them back again. With our precarious lives, mortals fascinate the gods… inside the bull – a god. Inside the image of the bull – a girl. Inside the girl – the Minotaur. Maybe this is it. A revelation followed by a necessary concealment.’
'In the Tracks of the Yellow Dog', tapestry
Other works in the exhibition reference Matthew’s affinity with aboriginal art, as well as Cornwall’s link with ancient Irish and Scottish Celtic traditions. “Matthew had always had a wariness about Celtic iconography but in 2015 he began to engage with it,” says Judith, “anticipating an exhibition in Ireland, and stimulated by Dominic Kelly’s storytelling in Penzance about the Ulster hero of Celtic myth, Cucullain.” Matthew also frequently used Christian iconography and titles in his painting. “I think this signifies his sense of belonging as an artist to the strong religious traditions of art history, but he did not follow any religion or hold any specific belief in an afterlife,” says Judith. There are two Madonna paintings in this New Craftsman exhibition, both examples of the rich diversity of Matthew’s approach to colour and form, “but he always offers a challenge to art traditions” Judith adds. “There is no suggestion of a child in his Madonna works: they may suggest instead a woman mothering her own soul or woman as an object of adoration. In life he greatly enjoyed the company of many women, for their conversation, competence, diffidence and vivacity, but also, he had a fascination with women absorbed in what they were doing and able to abandon themselves.”
His only tapestry, which takes centre stage in this exhibition, is from that important exhibition of 2016 and was created in the last year of his life. It commemorates the passing of his mother and makes use of contemporary landmarks in and around St Ives and the iconography of both prehistory, and the Rudyard Kipling stories his mother read to him as a child. “It holds a key place in his life’s work,” writes Judith. It is perhaps one of the most touching and resonant examples of Matthew Lanyon the artist, and Matthew Lanyon the man.
See Matthew Lanyon: No Holds Barred, Life & Art from 19th October to 15th November 2024 at New Craftsman Gallery, 24 Fore St, St Ives, and at newcraftsmanstives.com
Words by Mercedes Smith
'Haymaker'
'First Light'
'Madonna'
'Europa 1'
'Athena'