Matthew Lanyon - In The Tracks of The Yellow Dog

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

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

Front cover:

retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electrical, mechanical

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