Peter Lanyon
Peter Lanyon (1918-1964) stands as one of the most original and influential British painters of the postwar period, celebrated for his dynamic fusion of landscape, abstraction, and embodied experience. Born in St Ives, Cornwall, Lanyon grew up intimately connected to the rugged coastal environment that would form the foundation of his entire artistic vocabulary. While often associated with the St Ives School, Lanyon was more restless, ambitious, and experimental than many of his contemporaries. He sought not merely to depict landscape but to inhabit it — to render the sensation of moving through space, feeling wind pressure, climbing cliffs, or soaring above the coastline.
Lanyon trained intermittently under Adrian Stokes and at the Euston Road School, but his most formative encounters were with Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo during the wartime years in St Ives. Their Constructivist rigor, along with Nicholson’s reductive abstraction, shaped Lanyon’s early approach to structure. Yet he combined these modernist influences with a visceral, physical engagement with place, producing paintings that vibrate with psychological and environmental intensity.
By the late 1940s and 1950s, Lanyon’s work evolved into large, gestural abstractions, paralleling American Abstract Expressionism. Exhibitions in New York connected him with the circle of Rothko, Motherwell, and de Kooning, and he absorbed the expressive freedom of their work without losing the geographical specificity of Cornwall. His palette — sea-greens, chalky whites, mineral greys — remains unmistakably topographic even at its most abstract.
In the early 1960s, Lanyon began gliding, an experience that transformed his practice. He sought to understand landscape from above, painting the thermal currents, airflows, and drifting sensations of flight. Works from this period, including Thermal and High Wind, achieve a new openness and spatial complexity, layering memory, sensation, and movement into floating, planar structures.
Lanyon’s career was cut short in 1964 when he died from injuries after a gliding accident, but his legacy remains profound. His paintings are held in the Tate, MoMA, the V&A, and major international collections. Lanyon reshaped what landscape painting could be — not a view, but an experience lived, felt, and reimagined through abstraction.
Peter Lanyon (1918–1964)
Peter Lanyon stands as one of the most original and influential British painters of the postwar period, celebrated for his dynamic fusion of landscape, abstraction, and embodied experience. Born in St Ives, Cornwall, Lanyon grew up intimately connected to the rugged coastal environment that would form the foundation of his entire artistic vocabulary. While often associated with the St Ives School, Lanyon was more restless, ambitious, and experimental than many of his contemporaries. He sought not merely to depict landscape but to inhabit it — to render the sensation of moving through space, feeling wind pressure, climbing cliffs, or soaring above the coastline.
Lanyon trained intermittently under Adrian Stokes and at the Euston Road School, but his most formative encounters were with Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo during the wartime years in St Ives. Their Constructivist rigor, along with Nicholson’s reductive abstraction, shaped Lanyon’s early approach to structure. Yet he combined these modernist influences with a visceral, physical engagement with place, producing paintings that vibrate with psychological and environmental intensity.
By the late 1940s and 1950s, Lanyon’s work evolved into large, gestural abstractions, paralleling American Abstract Expressionism. Exhibitions in New York connected him with the circle of Rothko, Motherwell, and de Kooning, and he absorbed the expressive freedom of their work without losing the geographical specificity of Cornwall. His palette — sea-greens, chalky whites, mineral greys — remains unmistakably topographic even at its most abstract.
In the early 1960s, Lanyon began gliding, an experience that transformed his practice. He sought to understand landscape from above, painting the thermal currents, airflows, and drifting sensations of flight. Works from this period, including Thermal and High Wind, achieve a new openness and spatial complexity, layering memory, sensation, and movement into floating, planar structures.
Lanyon’s career was cut short in 1964 when he died from injuries after a gliding accident, but his legacy remains profound. His paintings are held in the Tate, MoMA, the V&A, and major international collections. Lanyon reshaped what landscape painting could be — not a view, but an experience lived, felt, and reimagined through abstraction.