Peter Lanyon (1918–1964) was a British painter associated with the St Ives School, known for his abstract landscapes inspired by the Cornish coast and his experiences hang-gliding
I was obsessed with Peter Lanyon and his work as a teenager and young artist. The most influential painting for me was Trevalgan. I was 18, in the first year of my degree in Fine Art Painting, and encountering this work was like lightning.
Peter Lanyon was the first contemporary painter to show me emotion and experience within the gestures of marks—marks he made from his flying trips over the Cornish landscape. He was into hang-gliding, and you can feel that aerial perspective in his work, that sense of being above and within the landscape simultaneously. His paintings don't just depict landscape; they embody the experience of moving through it, of being buffeted by wind, of seeing land and sea merge from above.
His work taught me that painting could carry the physical memory of place, that your marks could hold not just what you saw but what you felt.
MY FAVOURITE PIECE
Trevalgan (1951)
Oil on board, 122 × 114 cm (48 × 45 in)
