Matthew Lanyon - Beyond the Mark

MATTHEW LANYON

MATTHEW LANYON Beyond The Mark

13 September – 11 October 2014

Published by New Craftsman Gallery, St Ives, Conwall.

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NEW CRAFTSMAN GALLERY Front cover:

The Basic Happiness of René and Fatima 81 x 122 cm

Oil and gold leaf on canvas

24 Fore Street · St Ives Cornwall TR26 1HE 01736 795652 www.newcraftsmanstives.com

Copyright ©2014 New Craftsman Gallery

Right: Keeping Scotland

The full exhibition can be viewed on our website.

ISBN: 978-0-9926590-7-3

69 x 23 cm

All work is for sale from receipt of this catalogue.

Oil on paper

Beyond the Mark Oil paint, Matthew Lanyon tells me, can take as long as ninety years to dry fully. Ninety years during which a painting goes on quietly changing of its own accord, becoming itself, learning to be looked at by new eyes.

Will artists be using oil paints at all in the year 2104? I am glad that Matthew Lanyon still does, because to me the smell that haunts the door to his studio on a warm June afternoon – linseed oil, turps, the indefinable earthy-flowery backnote of pigment – is the smell of art. Art in its living state, that is, caught in the act of being made.Which in practice means being destroyed and begun again, often innumerable times.

On a surface to one side of the painting area, a slew of Stanley knife blades lies like spilled treasure.Their edges are gobbed with bright scrapings of cadmium red, Naples yellow, burnt sienna – lethal evidence of the artist’s second, or fifth, or fiftieth thoughts about a work in progress. Lanyon has a craftsman’s feel for tools and materials that are good to handle.With this go certain useful rules of engagement, such as,‘if you’re prepared to scrape a painting back, then it’s really begun.’

And he means it: really as in fasten your seatbelts. Once begun, once the knife is out, a painting can play hard to get. It can suggest one solution while demanding another. It can enthral and infuriate, conceal its strengths and flaunt its weaknesses. Lanyon has another rule: that in the final analysis, as his artist father put it, a painting ‘only adds up one way’.

But how does Lanyon decide which way? Typically in his paintings, there’s a lot of action around the edges.Whatever is going on in the centre, there is the possibility of a peripheral journey, a kind of coast path around the painting that could start or end on any one of its four sides.The route is often marked by topographic ciphers. If you’re familiar with Lanyon’s work, you quickly recognise ‘the usual suspects’.‘Abstract’ is a word you could use 2

in this context only with caution and qualification. At your peril, I would say.

Take Holding the Very. If you start at top left, you can follow the beam of Godrevy Lighthouse as it sharpens to a point, below which a fiery spot denotes the midsummer sunset viewed from Gwithian.Track upwards to the right, and the triangular shape signifies Perranporth airfield.The journey continues under a blue moon, down the right side to the lights on the communications mast above Camborne.The clockwise traveller then passes through at least three more sunrises, large and small, to reach, at lower left, an area resembling a misty long-barrow – firm ground under the sea, with a figure-of-eight ship’s propeller turning above.

Within such frames of reference, particular narratives take shape – stories, as often as not, that speak of wild pursuits and unmapped regions. In 2010–11 Lanyon produced a series of paintings informed by the myth of Europa, the girl carried out to sea by Zeus in the shape of a bull. Horns or breasts, cliffs or coves: the shapes oscillate between associations. In the present show, Holding the Very contains references to figures of an ancient Greek kore, a midwife bending her partner’s leg, and, bearing John the Baptist’s head on a platter at centre-left, the now-you-see-her-now-youdon’t presence of Salome.With Lanyon’s larger works especially, narrative allusion in the title is not – as is often the case with abstract art – a loosely connected identifier but a clue to the work’s formation. And ‘Once you read it, you’ve got lock-on.’

Artists through history have developed different ways of tricking a painting into showing what it’s made of. Leonardo da Vinci advised placing a mirror in the studio, to view your work back-to-front. Sandra Blow had an internal spyhole at roof level in her studio, from which she liked to ‘catch a painting unawares’. Lanyon’s technique for getting a painting to ‘talk back’ is best understood from the top of a stepladder – the vantage point he adopts to see whether or not it ‘adds up’. He has installed a small horizontal

Holding the Very 152 x 213 cm Oil on canvas 3

wheel, like a potter’s wheel, which can support even large canvases attached to a backboard.Viewed this way, through a series of rotations, paintings are shaken up to reveal imbalances or false terms in the visual equation, to allow Lanyon to pinpoint at each stage of a work’s evolution ‘the species of failure that drives an artist on’.

Though the wheel helps, there are no short cuts between a blank canvas and a painting that adds up.‘Painters have to invent themselves every time,’ Lanyon insists, giving this axiom – which all serious artists recognise – a chastening evolutionary turn:‘It’s having to start again as a cephalopod.’ A risky business, then; but ‘Without risk, it’s just entertainment.’ Looking down from the ladder as Lanyon demonstrates how the wheel works, I don't want Seventh Lap to stop turning.The spinning and dislocation of the image replicate in a few moments the art-induced vertigo that more usually comes after long looking, as the eye moves constantly between tiny details, like Holding the Very’s Gwithian sunset, and the framing or animating forms within which such details live as though for themselves alone.

What I like and look for in a painting, I realise, is this feeling of something that goes on being made, that survives any number of assaults, and – even once it has left the studio and started a calmer phase of existence, in which the worst it may suffer is an unsympathetic stare – goes on becoming. Like aircraft fuel, gunpowder or wind off the sea, the smell of oil paint is a heady summons, leading the painter and the viewer towards a terra incognita.The stories and map-like journeying are part of this process too. For all the sensory pleasure to be had from the materiality of paint, from the pressure and momentum of a brushstroke or knife-scrape,‘It’s imperative’ (Lanyon cites his father once more) ‘to go beyond the mark.’

Cat’s Cradle 140 x 125 cm 4

Seventh Lap Acrylic on canvas

Michael Bird, August 2014

94 x 180 cm

Oil and acrylic on canvas 5

Alaska 122 x 152 cm

Crude Oil (Wreck of the Torrey Canyon) Oil on canvas

122 x 182 cm

Oil on canvas 7

Boyfriend 76 x 17 cm 8

Pirate Oil on board

76 x 17 cm

Pasiphae X Oil on board

78 x 118 cm

Oil on canvas 9

Back to Nature

Innisfree

68 x 80 cm

78 x 76 cm

10

Oil on board

Oil on canvas 11

Windpower 43 x 46 cm

Oil on board

Shanty 19 x 53 cm 12

Saddle up the Palomino Oil on board

152 x 152 cm

Oil on canvas 13

Shipping Forecast

Godrevy LXXXVl

44 x 106 cm

76 x 122 cm

14

Oil on board

Acrylic and oil on canvas 15

One Say Tell 47 x 109 cm 16

Ariadne Oil on board

58 x 99 cm

Oil on board 17

Airfield 23 x 69 cm

Oil on paper

Kelly Island 23 x 69 cm

Oil on paper

Soft Pedal 52 x 52 cm 18

Oil on paper 19

Girl on the Moss

Card Table

30 x 42 cm

29 x 29 cm

20

Oil on paper

Carl Diving Oil on board

108 x 108 cm

Oil on board 21

Browne’s Point

Day One

24 x 70 cm

23 x 69 cm

Oil on paper

Barefoot 26 x 47 cm

22

Oil on paper

No More Patrick Oil on board

23 x 69 cm

Oil on paper

23

Godrevy LXXXIV 7 x 23 cm

Oil on board

Godrevy LXXXV 7 x 23 cm

Oil on board

Carbis Bay 37 x 37 cm 24

Oil on paper 25

Valentine 7 x 23 cm

Oil on board

Tailings 7 x 23 cm

Oil on board

Boathouse 7 x 23 cm 26

Green of Diamonds Oil on board

43 x 46 cm

Oil on board 27

Anima Mundi 91 x 305 cm 28

Acrylic on canvas

Portrait photograph : Martin Howse

NEW CRAFTSMAN GALLERY obc4