Untitled Working Study has been identified as a
rare drawing from Peter Lanyon’s gliding series. 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.