'Lanyon's first one-man exhibition in New York in 1957 was very well received, and Lanyon was accepted as an equal by the American painters who were just beginning to win an international reputation. He and Rothko became good friends, and Lanyon brought Rothko to St Ives in August 1958 to look for a chapel in the West Penrith landscape which Rothko could decorate. Nothing came of this, but Lanyon spent increasingly more of his time in the United States, and towards the end of his life began to get impatient with England and with the small world of St Ives.

He took up gliding in 1959, primarily as a way to get to know the landscape better. The experience brought to his pictures a greater feeling of sea and air, in contrast to the heavy earthiness of the earlier work. The tendency towards monochrome gives way to a much greater range of colour, and it was this that Lanyon was exploring at the time of his accidental death in August 1964. Totally unexpected and gratuitous, it was a blow from which painting in St Ives was never quite to recover.'

Extract from St Ives 1939-64 Twenty Five Years of Painting, Sculpture and Pottery
The Tate Gallery, London, 1985


Peter Lanyon died on August 31st, 1964, after a gliding accident. He was 46. His painting since the mid-fifties had shown a variety of invention with few parallels in recent English painting, and his last work suggests that his creative power was intensifying at the time of his death. He had realised his natural talent slowly and with difficulty in the forties, and in the fifties had become one of a very small number of outward-looking and unchauvinistic English painters who attempted to find new ways forward for English art within the context of the modern movement. Lanyon was then fighting for recognition in an atmosphere of general distaste for advanced art with abstract leanings. It is particularly tragic that he should have died at a time when a wider public was coming to acknowledge the significance and value of this kind of painting, to the growth of which LanyonÕs contribution must increasingly be recognised.

Andrew Causey

From The Painting of Peter Lanyon by Andrew Causey. Aidan Ellis Publishing Ltd, 1971


Peter Lanyon:

'The sea then became something which was down towards my feet, less towards the side of my feet, less perhaps in front of me as it was as I looked from the beach. I then walked over the Western Hill, and the gale struck me straight on. It was very cold too, though it was June. I lay down and looked over the edge and watched the sea coming in, striking on the shore and on to the rocks there, and breaking off and going away out to sea again, and I came back over the Western Hill, inwards, southerly, and down under the lea and the shelter, and there I sat down in the grass Ð long grass with a lot of remains of sea pinks, and the grass browning slightly due to a certain amount of sunshine. The sun began to come out at that time and the grass blew and the sea and the sky became bluer.'

'...in his (Lanyon's) isolation he began a journey into a landscape-seascape experience that became utterly his own and consuming.'

Extract from: St Ives 1939-64 - Twenty Five Years of Painting, Sculpture and Pottery, The Tate Gallery, London, 1985



Peter Lanyon:

'I merely state my preference for painting as being a recreation of experience in immediacy, a process of being, made now. The mark of the hand and arm can be either frozen gesture or revelation. There is a huge difference between the two: the gesture made in desperation or joy is not enough, it is scything the air. In painting, gesture must attach itself and become its opposite, and be cut and thrashed and extracted from a wealth of soil-based and rooted knowledge É Man knows a mine in him and acknowledges the aspiration of the stars. In the very small and the very big there is a common image. Both germ and star affirming their gender can see the surface whereon man is made more naked.'