Peter Lanyon

Drawing was a profoundly serious activity for Peter Lanyon, recognising it as the foundation of his imagery. The present work Untitled Working Study has been identified as a rare drawing from his gliding series, an activity which from 1959 impacted Lanyon’s life and practice significantly. While Lanyon was all too familiar with the Cornish scenery from the ground, viewing the landscape from above opened the artist to a new dimension of landscape painting. Here, the sensation of moving through the air, floating over areas of land that he could not otherwise experience by foot moved Lanyon to incorporate a lighter palette in his work with bold and overlapping gestural marks. Untitled Working Study shares these compositional elements with masterpiece oils Orpheus, 1961, Lost Mine, 1959 as the expressive, interlocking soft and hard conté lines translate this freeing feeling, as well as the shape of the land from multiple perspectives onto the page. The heavier lines are also seen to represent various mine shafts within the land, which formed a large part of Cornish history. This is also repeated in the monumental oil St Just, 1953, where a vertical black line powerfully divides the landscape in two. The forked ‘V’ shape at the top of the canvas, seen also in the present work, symbolises a crucifixion scene: a memorial to those who lost their life working underground. In a twist of dreadful irony, Lanyon crashed his glider in August 1964, ending his life aged just 46.