MATTHEW LANYON
The full exhibition can be viewed on our website. All work is for sale from receipt of catalogue. Copyright Š2016 New Craftsman Gallery & Matthew Lanyon. ISBN: 978-0-9934009-1-9
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Mandate of Heaven
or otherwise, without first seeking the permission of the publishers.
152 x 152 cm
Oil and acrylic on canvas
MATTHEW LANYON In the Tracks of the Yellow Dog
10 September – 8 October 2016
NEW CRAFTSMAN GALLERY 24 Fore Street · St Ives Cornwall TR26 1HE 01736 795652 www.newcraftsmanstives.com
IN THE TRACKS OF THE YELLOW DOG – a just so story Flicking through Finding Stuff When it Comes to Losing Stuff, under B, she
pot in a Glasgow museum. Catching her breath by the no-change-as-
was looking up biros, again. Neck-and-neck for main bane in her life,
usual-dammit kiosk, suspended in blue light disbelief as ‘the thinly
biros and spectacles really needed to catch up. Couldn’t they be made
disguised girl,’ she was interrupted halfway through a ghostly twix by her
to twinkle, or beep, or something? Drifting off, she was slipping slowly
muse: ‘well, … here’s an audience,’ says Dingo.
sideways when thought took hold. In the game of Fast Forward to the End it’s always time to be … moving on, to be getting away from the
‘… we owe a cock to Asclepius already?’
struggle of getting back up after dropping her notebook on leave-a-note nights, and leave a note. Time enough. It was nearly midnight when no
In this extraordinary exhibition by her son Matthew, from his two
sooner thought than covers thrown, biro brilliantly caught … bottom
stunning pieces of architectural glass, Spiral Form and Open Country, to
sheet hospital bed, the moving finger writes … two words:
his first exquisite tapestry, In the Tracks of the Yellow Dog we are carried in a procession of paintings and prints on High Seat, (the Inuit way)
‘… gone walkabout.’
through Bushfire and Snow, assisted in this cross-cultural odyssey by expert weavers from the great Jacquard loom at Flanders Tapestries in
… and having writ … hardly ever an unmixed blessing, these moving
Belgium where a thousand tiny-fingered Rumpled-stiltskins laboured his
fingers could express or even trigger wildness, lucidity, moves as big as
straw into gold. As did the many ‘… love the sound of breaking glass …’
moving house, or moments as ordinary as finding the moon in a puddle
craftsmen and women at Derix Glass Studios in Germany, where inci-
for the first time, all over again. ‘… moving on’ was just too passive. She
dentally, the enormous window for Tate St. Ives was fabricated in the
needed something more assertive, like an injunction … move along,
early 1980s. On and up the stairs … steady, to the complete nine of his
please, or … put, the gun, down. There wasn’t time now to figure, or look
prints, patiently and expertly screened over the last two decades, by
up words like ‘ichthonic,’ or ‘epistemology,’ so she trashed them, as
John Rossell of Newlyn and shown here for the first time all together.
expletives – a bit like Captain Haddock’s ‘… blue blistering barnacles!’ only different. And this glowing-in-the-dark malarkey, what was that all
‘One good thing, now that I’m almost incandescing, my dear Dingo, we
about? She wasn’t expecting to be emitting light. Bioluminescence might
won’t have to wait around for the old protagonist to make up his mind.
be a way of getting her mits back on, if not back round the neck of
What’s more, we’ve a wedding to attend, a top-notch watch-out-for-the-
meaning but one question remained. She glowed much but to what
shoulder-blade-in-your-soup kind of wedding at Thebes, after which … can’t
end? The old positivism, experimental science, was reliable up to a
wait can we? … my interview with Mr. Death … could be noisy, mind …
point…take-the-pills.
remind me to complain bitterly with something, and in no uncertain terms … bad form not to.’ ‘… now warries mate.’ Says Dingo. ‘… if the soup’s as
Dressing gown, slippers, mits and she was off. Out through the
you suspect, sounds like there’ll be at least one bone to contend with.’
automatic into night’s shuffling corridor, following in the tracks of her sometimes three-headed yellow dog muse she called Dingo. Coming
So, off they go, dearly beloveds, Dingo way ahead as usual, as if … into
out of the lift on the ground floor still rehearsing a roller-coaster conver-
the chuckling night. No more old saw, those red-herring inflated
sation on the telephone with Persephone queen of the dead, she was
currencies of debate that once divided art from artists, abstract from
approaching the kiosk on the left when she remembered a drawing she
figurative, all the way from the rock arts of Magdalanean France and
liked of a little yellow dog seen on the side of a twelfth century Chinese
Spain to the so-called geometric designs on figurines and pots from
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In the Tracks of the Yellow Dog 139 x 246 cm
Tapestry, numbered edition
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Catal Huyuk in Turkey. Indeed, all the way up and down the backstreets
‘… same-old, same-old … matter doo-ee? … come on Dingo … always
of St Ives in the 1950s until, hot on these heels, coming in close-by, ears
hungry, dusty in the sunshine, never any nearer, always far away …’
up. ‘… as if … what?’ Asks Dingo, ‘… as if …’ Sussing a painting would take her no time at all. For her, a painting was ‘… there was never any price to pay,’ she says.
either cooked or it wasn’t. She’d have wasted no time in loading all the exquisite and the precious she was given to, un-earthed from the
From carpets depicting Russian bombs falling on Afghans to braille
fantastic in splendid adornment. Old Father Time? She was none of it. On
designs on the walls of Gavrini’s passage grave in southern Brittany, to
one of her pillow-cases we found this:
Ireland’s reconstructed Newgrange with its triple spiral buried up to its back wall in the earth to attend forever its midwinter meet with the
‘Time calls today, she finds me in, her toothless hours all my minutes win.’
rising sun, this is a shortcut across cultures, continents, open country, any country still open to an old woman and her muse. In Beaker People, we
Was this her quiet feminism un-middened by memory’s gentle switch to
need to travel lightly. Her ship is shown loaded to its gunnels crossing a
a cardboard moon? We found her a new bulb un-deck of her steamship,
stripy sea carrying everything from wall paintings of Thera to Bradshaw
still steaming its postcard way out of re-named Bombay at the age of
figures from Arnhem Land in North Western Australia. In a sea of
six, all the way home to her Surrey-gardens-maude with her father and
spirals, roaming bands of zig-zags and ship-shapes rigged in pink binder-
a man called Kipling. If it still flickers for us now, dearly beloveds, it’s
twine ride out storms of joyously waiting Walbiri iconographers
because she was unclear if this was told her by her father, or something
moments from being wrecked on a coast of soliloquy.
she actually remembered seeing herself. Suffice, she was savvy enough to say: ‘… remember it this way … he was there every morning after we
Forces to be working with, or wrecks to be forcing with, this is an
came up from breakfast, sat in his deck-chair scribbling, all over his white
exhibition that opens on difference, to everything and anything against
cuffs …’ No sooner said, dearly beloveds, than this was followed by
exploded diagrams in armaments’ meetings neatly arranged for the un-
another of her many lucid moments:
arranged dead. Loaded into parentheses, dragged onto the margins, prevented from signifying, everything becomes significant in the disap-
‘… must have been ambidextrous.’
pearing of whole peoples, loved ones, loved languages and beautiful things. Mind you, even the penguins didn’t see it coming, forced all those millions of years ago to leave their cosy Mediterranean lifestyles to take turns standing on an egg in the bitter winter winds at the south pole.
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Matthew Lanyon. May 2016
Open Country 110 x 110 cm
Laminated antique art glass
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Spiral Form 135 x 122 cm
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Laminated antique art glass
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Bushfire and Snow 152 x 152 cm
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Oil and acrylic on canvas
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Boy Peter 108 x 106 cm
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Oil on board
Iona 179 x 94 cm
Oil on canvas
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Goldrush 81 x 120 cm
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Oil on canvas
High Seat 81 x 120 cm
Oil on canvas
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Three Wishes 91 x 152 cm
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Oil and gold leaf on canvas
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Passing Place 106 x 152 cm
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Oil on canvas
Palace of Zen 122 x 152 cm
Oil and acrylic on canvas
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Beaker People 91 x 304 cm
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Acrylic on canvas
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Motherline 79 x 79 cm
Oil on board
Red Figure 16 x 81 cm
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Oil on board
Mayday 73 x 68 cm
Oil on board
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All the Muses 77 x 118 cm
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Oil on canvas
Yellow Dog 75 x 122 cm
Oil on canvas
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West of Trixie 43 x 90 cm
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Oil on board
Greenlander 45 x 109 cm
Oil on board
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Mile High 60 x 109 cm
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Oil on board
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Nine prints each 29 x 42 cm (image size)
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Screenprints, editions of 54, available individually
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Haymaker 26 x 47 cm
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Oil on board
‘I thought I saw an eagle’ 26 x 47 cm
Oil on board
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Elephant in the Room 15 x 15 cm
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Oil on board
Newcomer 15 x 15 cm
Oil on board
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Landscape with a Calm 10 x 30 cm
Oil and pigment pen on board
Walkabout 10 x 30 cm
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Oil on board
Dolly Blue 10 x 30 cm
Oil on board
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Holiday Tracks 29 x 42 cm
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Screenprint, edition of 54
NEW CRAFTSMAN GALLERY