Words by Martin Holman
The inner world of Arthur Lanyon’s paintings combines intuitive motifs with an emotive, gestural, abstracted language.
When he decides to start another painting, Arthur Lanyon crosses the threshold between two aspects of his life. He leaves the home that he shares with his young family and enters his studio. Those two aspects are not compartmentalised. The interplay between real and invented, personal and public, the observed and accidental is apparent in his compositions.
When applied to art, abstraction implies a foothold in the world we experience, even if evidence of it is hard to recognise. Lanyon, as a spirited exponent of abstract art, integrates the figurative world with the swirling climate of marks, colours and mute motifs, signs that seem to belong to a reality all their own. His painting fizzes out of the combination.
In Waystation, a small recent painting on panel, a gritty, greyish texture combines oil, acrylic, watercolour and charcoal into a collage of unsettled atmosphere. Irregular black-edged, boxy shapes containing patches of yellow, green, red and black seem to blow around like autumn leaves caught in an updraft. In their midst is a larger vertical form. Comprising blocky, connected elements, it appears to be leaning gently forward as if to resist the enveloping turbulence. What if that dominant shape is standing in for a figure?
The sighting is not positive because, with this painter, shapes and colours can have multiple readings simultaneously. The title does not help confirm suspicions. And the pretend space of the painting is a playground for diverse impressions and interpretations. So ‘what ifs’ are allowed in the search for significance, even though the search will always be more fantastical than definitive.
So, what if the dark-haired and bearded artist himself has somehow set foot in his own construction? The form even appears to wield a stick that may be seen in some lights as a brush. Art history is full of self-portraits of artists at work in their studios. Rembrandt’s famous version from about 1628 is only one of the most famous. The Dutch master depicted himself standing in an empty room, facing the easel. It blocks his path to the door and everyday life outside. Tellingly, rather than depict the act of creation, Rembrandt focuses on the daunting expectations of the surface to be painted.
Arthur Lanyon will know that predicament. For him, as for most artists, the studio is a special place – a laboratory, retreat, prison. Maybe it is the nearest a human can get this side of psychiatry to inhabiting her or his own mind. Inside, neural fibres can almost be heard to snap across a synapse to release the positively charged ions of creativity. The metaphor seems especially appropriate to Lanyon: the pacy structures in his paintings seem to trace electric flows and polarisation akin to brain activity.
LEFT: ‘Rattle’, 2024, oil stick, acrylic, spray paint, charcoal, collage on panel, 47 x 62 cm RIGHT: ‘Waystation’, 2024, oil, acrylic, watercolour, charcoal, collage on panel, 47 x 62 cm
He describes his studio in the countryside outside Penzance as a polytunnel. With a vaulted translucent roof made with an arching metal frame, it deserves that comparison. Sheets of polythene and plastic admit ample natural light only partially obscured by supplies of wood, plastic and canvas that Lanyon stores overhead. The studio is ground zero. From within its walls, he has captured the attention and imagination of a growing audience with his expressive production. Since 2016, he has exhibited with Anima Mundi gallery in St Ives. A photo feature in the weekend edition of the Guardian national newspaper accompanied his last solo exhibition there, two summers ago. Although his work is most often seen in his native West Cornwall, opportunities have also occurred in recent years in London, continental Europe and Mexico.
Lanyon’s practice is physical. In summer, the studio is hot and draughts are scarce; and its location means that winter’s north-westerlies whistle across his workspace. But, as he points out, at least he can stand to his full height indoors. A previous studio was so low that he knelt for much of the time on wood pallets. His knees complained vehemently. Then luck, of a sort, intervened and he moved his archive of existing paintings, his equipment and his growing family into new surroundings. Or not exactly new but the house he had grown up in. Built by his parents, it was now vacant.
LEFT: ‘Timbras’, 2024, oil stick, charcoal, collage on panel, 62 x 47 cm RIGHT: ‘Tripletta’, 2024, oil stick, charcoal, collage on panel, 62 x 47 cm
“Painting,” Lanyon said a few years ago to Joe Clarke, the owner of Anima Mundi, “is like having two reciprocal minds. You direct but also take direction back and forth.” Painting emerges from his commitment to materials. Talking about individual pieces he has made, he navigates the tussle of lines and flashes of colour with references to the paints he uses and how they come to appear at that point in the work. He speaks animatedly about a deep black paint he has discovered. A copper chromite spinel mixed into linseed oil, it gives him the viscous matte finish like slate that enriches a distinctive feature of his pictures for several years.
The diversity of Lanyon’s marks offers one path into interpreting his work. It is not unknown for the artist to invite visitors to add their marks as well; his children certainly contribute from time to time. Linear shapes are the building blocks of his visual language, weaving over and through images “like trails of a hungry snail”, he says. That vivid indication of Lanyon’s eclectic inspirations may offer a way into one large painting on linen, called Snail’s Pace. The surface is traversed by pathways unsure of their destination. Neutral tones of white, grey and black prevail. Loaded with streams, strings and sequences, the image all but banishes colour into ethereal traces of the primary hues Lanyon enjoys.
“Decisions have to be dealt with materially,” he says. ‘I mix lots of media and pressures of application so it helps to understand the properties of the substances I use. Otherwise, things will crack and fall off.” For instance, pigments have different drying times and mixing media into one image calls for a fabric support strong enough to take constant, vigorous working.
Lanyon choses a hard-wearing, coarse linen for his biggest compositions. They often combine oil paint, acrylic and primer, spray paint, xylene marker pens, solvents as well as charcoal dust. He collages cloth and paper and regularly applies an all-over thin red wash with a cloth. That leaves a subtle red stain in bright colours, preventing them from becoming too “pretty”.
He also rigorously edits and alters. After hauling a large expanse of unstretched canvas into his garden, he erases passages of work with an orbit sander. Or he will sand out areas of paint to aid the overall balance of light and dark, colour and space in the emerging composition. Time is also set aside for turning the pages of books, sifting through drawings or reflecting on the previous day’s progress. He is alert to the dynamic advances of modern painting. Graduating in 2008 with a first from art school in Cardiff, he had studied the radical theories of twentieth-century art, especially Cubism. The visual style pioneered by Picasso and Georges Braque, it proposed a new reality that depicted radically fragmented objects. But he also looks for ideas from the deeper past. Sources can be surprising: his latest, crowded canvases recall the technical artistry of Japanese woodblock prints from the nineteenth-century, distinguished by the intricate structure of colour gradients.
Lanyon was born in Leicester. But his heritage is in west Cornwall – and deeply rooted in art history. His grandfather was Peter Lanyon, justifiably acclaimed as one of the most important painters in postwar Britain. A leading figure in what has come to be known as the St Ives School (although the artists associated with it recognised no such coherent group), he adapted the expressionist trend in abstract art towards forms and gestures inspired by the landscape and climate of West Cornwall which he knew intimately from walking, cycling, swimming, caving and, ultimately, gliding.
Arthur Lanyon’s father Matthew, however, held back from pursuing art, studying geology at Leicester university and practising joinery. Within two years of his arrival in 1985, Arthur and his parents were living in Cornwall. Moreover, Matthew was now painting, assimilating his own father’s influence into his own semi-abstract paintings indebted to his home environment. Every day began with drawing and painting with his son, in the days before Arthur went to school. Memory and past experiences are important sources for this latest Lanyon to join the art scene. His childhood drawings are also a starting point. He likes to connect with the intuitive graphic skills of very young people because their exciting directness defies adults’ cautious rationality.
Indeed, for one large painting called A Moon with a View, Lanyon borrows a tree from a drawing by his small son, Rory. Elaborated into a multicoloured canopy of chopped together reds and greens, it appears at the top edge of the canvas. Unable to fit an owl hole into the slender trunk he had drawn, Rory sketched a circle on the vacant paper beside it, setting the hole loose to float on the page. The curious logic of that solution fired Lanyon into a composition of his own. A chain reaction followed that gave expression to his natural good humour, an asset as strong as the formal nimbleness of his drawing.
Giving insight into his own approach, Lanyon quotes the influential contemporary American painter, George Condo, who once described the brushstroke of fellow American Jackson Pollock as “like a caveman scratching at the wall of his own mind.” The line stands out as relevant to Lanyon because his paintings burrow into his consciousness and that of his audience. Somehow, the situations he paints strikes a chord with each onlooker’s own experience. Like his grandfather and father, Lanyon paints sensations. Unlike them, his attention is concentrated on the process of painting instead of on the land. Through action he makes contact with the inner energy of intellectual and emotional life. Sometimes colour expresses those feelings directly. Asked to describe the purpose he attaches to the colour orange, he candidly replies, “psychedelics, an optical buzz. It’s used sparingly; it can take a week for an image to settle and rock.”
The nearest comparison to the febrile agitation of a painting like the recent Quartz Crash is the helter-skelter, discontinuity of the trip back to waking from anaesthesia. A panoply of effects is put on display. Drawing swings cinematically from colour to monochrome like flashbacks in film. Indecipherable shapes hurtle this way and that across the surface of the canvas, intercut with the rapidity of marks that revs like a motorcycle engine. Time is bent and space is shallow. Like Rembrandt’s easel in his studio, this canvas blocks the door and, with it, access to the exits.
Arthur Lanyon’s exhibition, A Moon with a View, is on view at Anima Mundi, Street-an-Pol, St Ives, from 19th July to 31st August 2024. All images © Arthur Lanyon and courtesy the artist and Anima Mundi.
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