MATTHEW LANYON
MATTHEW LANYON Faster than Words Older than Thought
08 September – 13 October 2018
Texts by Judith Lanyon The full exhibition can be viewed on our website. All work is for sale from receipt of catalogue. Copyright ©2018 New Craftsman Gallery & The Matthew Lanyon Estate ISBN: 978-0-9934009-7-1
New Craftsman Gallery 24 Fore Street . St Ives Cornwall TR26 1HE 01736 795652 newcraftsmanstives.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electrical, mechanical or otherwise, without first seeking the permission of the publishers. Front cover detail: White Horse, 2009 Oil on canvas 22’ x 5’ Inside cover detail: Write Me a Few Short Lines, She Said, 2014 Corked vials glass case 43.63“ x 43.13“ 3
Faster than Words Older than Thought MATTHEW LANYON Matthew had been making and re-making 3D objects, photographs, mixed media collages using found objects, short films of performance art, and paintings, in his studio workshop at home in West Cornwall for about ten years before turning more fully to painting, but had barely shown any of his work. He found endless satisfaction and joy in the careful process of invention, alongside the physical exertion of creating habitable spaces, feeding animals and children, and growing food. He had given up being a joiner in the building trade and re-worked his tools into surreal and arresting objects; he built a massive Cornish hedge at home by hand and packed a section with his cameras in place of stones, calling it, ‘Ways of Giving Up Photography’, and then of course, photographed it. He gave up, at various times, meat, dairy, wheat, roll ups and goats, but he never gave up painting. ‘…It’s an image from my life; a walkabout - quietly endless, difficult and surprising.’ (2004) The scale of his ambition was matched by his achievement, and he was well aware of a comic aspect in his own character: physically strong, stubborn, self-doubting and self-reliant, staggering under the weight or complexity of some gargantuan task he had set himself in the studio, or framing all his work himself as he did each year, he would often be heard to mutter, ‘this is too much for one small man!’ But he knew he 4
was onto something and was always seeking it, developing a personal iconography in painting, careful though not to ‘spill all his beans’ or try ‘to talk the river round its bend’. But when someone took an interest, used their senses and asked questions, he was delighted. ‘But the image is not reached directly. It stands behind as an emergent value – something lost, half-glimpsed, somehow essential.’ ‘It is an open bay with a round hill and long pier. It’s slate, north facing, steep, shady and very dark. The coast is flat – like you could roll marbles on it – but the road twists and turns. As you reach Godrevy you turn right around onto the south-facing coast of St Ives Bay.’ (2004) All the works in this exhibition were produced between 2000 and 2016. They include mixed media bottles pieces, where Matthew’s attraction to multiples and miniatures, and his ability to write tiny words in his own steady hand, are evident, along with his compassion, a deep connection with language and of course comedy. There is a 22’ wide painting on canvas, White Horse, which marks a point of exquisite clarity in the direction of his work as a painter, and several other rich and significant paintings of the landscapes and experiences he inhabits in his art.
He began making remarkable architectural stained-glass panels in 2014, and in this show the smaller stained glass, An Altarpiece for West Penwith, which he commissioned just before his death, is on display for the first time in Cornwall. Sadly, Matthew did not have the opportunity to see this enchanting piece in its finished form. There is a boundless re-creative spirit in Matthew’s art. He may be in space, out at sea, meditating on grief, shouldering beasts and burdens, inside out with eroticism, or piling up his boat for the final journey, but it never leaves him. This exhibition, the first in the UK since his death in November 2016, is a rare opportunity to share some of that spirit. JL
“Faster than words, painting is older than thought. The way we perceive the world is more significant than the way we think about it: It’s the first experiencing. For me it’s about integration – the old and the new experiences; holding them together, making sense through mythology.” Matthew Lanyon 2004 5
White Horse, 2009 Oil on canvas 22’ x 5’ – description on page 8 6
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White Horse
Circe
This remarkable painting was made over several months following a visit to the earliest and best of the white horse cuttings, the Uffington horse, marked out in chalk on the side of a hillside in Wiltshire. It has been there for three thousand years. Matthew looked at it from every angle; kites flew. While we were sitting on the grass an actual tall white horse came up a few yards behind us and stood for several minutes on the top of the hill. This is the second of his 22’ paintings. He has chosen a flatter more diagrammatic way of working with the horse clearly central and other figures on what could be a game board or possibly a tiled floor. Horses, with both magical and comic powers, feature regularly in his work, especially between 2009 and 2011. Matthew tiled two floors at home over this period, a more exhausting process than he anticipated.
This is the first in the series of Circe works. Greek mythology was compulsory in Matthew’s early learning but only later did he return to it and become enthralled, mainly by the female characters. Circe was a minor goddess with the voice of a mortal. She had the power to transform men into animals. When Odysseus landed on the island to which she had been banished, she turned all his men into pigs. He persuaded her to turn them back, using magical herbs to protect himself, and then stayed with her for a full year.
‘…and maybe, just maybe… this round, I will white you a beautiful horse’ poem Dec 2008
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Circe, 2000 Mixed Media 9” x 9” 9
An Altarpiece for West Penwith, 2017 Altarpiece of three hinged stained glass laminated panels 50.25� x 32.75� 10
An Altarpiece for West Penwith Matthew designed and commissioned this exquisite final piece of stained glass but did not live to see it completed. It was produced in partnership with Derix Studios, near Frankfurt. The images here include the Madonna on the left panel, an image found in two earlier works, the first in 2009. On the right is a new Godrevy, and the central panel depicts a journey around Matthew’s many suns; there is a boat carrying all that is sacred into the afterlife, the arches in St Ives Harbour and many other beautiful details drawn from the landscapes and experiences dear to him.
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Going into Space Matthew claimed sometimes that his use of black in painting meant life. The geometric line drawing is based on a small work of his father’s which he scaled up and incorporated into this work. Outer space was not threatening for Matthew but a place where he could imagine himself going, and he actually did write to NASA with his own idea for a new way of getting into space – on a rope, which would eliminate the need for ground airports. He also wrote a character in a poem, ‘the first poet in space to orbit the earth in a good mood’. This painting is in part about the miracle of love. ‘We went up like a rocket from the off you and me,’ he said, ‘and never stopped going’.
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Going into Space, 2015 Acrylic on canvas 49.25” x 55.25” 13
Porthleven Round, 2011 Oil on glass 26” x 28” 14
Porthleven Round The sea in the middle and the story told right around the outside of the painting, this is a Matthew Lanyon classic and recognizable form; here there seem to be two airfields, often drawn as the figure 4, probably Perranporth where Matthew spent time with his father, and Lands’ End. The boat is having a rough time of it. It is usually rewarding to turn Matthew’s paintings around so that figures can emerge in new ways. He often painted on the flat with the board on a turntable. This is his only square shaped oil on glass painting.
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Little Birdie Was it because he knew this was a very special small painting that he named it Little Birdie? In golf, which Matthew probably never played in his life, a birdie is an excellent shot or an excellent score. But the figure on the left in this painting, probably the male, has feather like plumage.
Little Birdie, 2015 Oil on board 9� x 9� 16
Pandora This work was made towards the end of the life of Suzanne, Matthew’s first wife and partner and the mother of their son Arthur, who was dying from a long illness. In Greek myth, Pandora was the first mortal woman ever made by the gods. In one story she takes the lid off a jar, thus unknowingly releasing all the plagues on humanity, but hope is also freed from the bottom of the jar and becomes an integral part of the human experience.
Pandora, 2007 Oil on board 12.5� x 12.5� 17
Crude Oil (Wreck of the Torrey Canyon) This painting seems to be generated from inside the sinking ship, but be embraced also by Matthew’s personal geography, with St Michael’s Mount, and the red lights from the Camborne-Redruth bypass dwarfed on the edge of the picture. Matthew was 16 when the Torrey Canyon sank off Lands’ End in 1967 with its entire cargo of crude oil spilling over the Cornish and Brittany coastlines. He vividly remembered cleaning oil from birds on the beaches. Livelihoods were heavily hit, as well as bird life. Attitudes to the sea as a dumping ground changed after the massive disaster – for many it was the birth of a lifelong commitment to a cleaner environment. Matthew’s enduring fascination with ships, whether sailing, sinking or rotting on the shore, drew him to seek them out in life as well as in art. This painting perhaps marks the turbulence experienced from a disaster over which he and local people had no control, coming so soon after the unexpected death of his father when he was 13; the world changed again.
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Crude Oil (Wreck of the Torrey Canyon), 2014 Oil on canvas 79” x 55” 19
Skibbereen, 2015 Oil on canvas 28.5�x 60�
A strong painting dominated by the triple spiral. For some years Matthew had been intrigued by early cave art and the carry through of forms into later periods of human culture. The triple spiral dates back to at least the Neolithic period in ancient art, thousands of years before writing, and is found at Newgrange in Ireland and across the world. He loved the connectedness of one unbroken line – made by one hand, which can be seen as 20
one life, coming around again and almost touching with the past and the future, birth and death, at all points. Matthew is bringing together a fizz of influences in this painting. He was looking ahead with excitement to an exhibition of his own work planned for 2017 in Skibbereen, West Cork, and venturing into the imagined world and culture of Ireland, connected so strongly in the past with his own western outpost.
Holding onto Blue, 2007 Oil on canvas 21.5�x 56�
I think this work finds the place of safety a person makes in their own heart when all else is broken.
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Arabian Nights Matthew often puts two figures in his paintings, male and female, usually one on each side of the work. Often they depict, in some half glimpsed way, the Angel Gabriel appearing to Mary in an endless variety of scenarios. This painting may or may not be among those, but it is an exotic and arresting painting.
Greenlander Completed in the months following his mother’s death, an untitled turbulent work in which St Michael’s Mount can perhaps be found, and Godrevy lighthouse, and Perranporth airfield. Matthew had an ancestry DNA gift for his 65th birthday in July 2016 which revealed that his genetic motherline was predominantly related to the human beings whose route out of Africa took them up into and through Greenland, something which delighted him. He, and his mother, had long been drawn to the idea of the oldest family member having the high seat on the back of the sledge and simply no longer being there at the end of the journey to the next camp. So then it gained a title.
Godrevy LXXVIII Arabian Nights, 2003 Oil on board 30.5” x 42”
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Matthew had produced 102 paintings called Godrevy by the end of his life. The lighthouse can be found in each of them. Matthew truly loved going to Godrevy and did so often. They are unfailingly beautiful paintings.
Godrevy LXXVIII, 2011 Oil on board 6” x 19.5”
Greenlander, 2016 Oil on board 43” x 18” 23
Hannigan’s Carn, 2012 Oil on glass 24” x 36”
‘It’s easy to get lost if you don’t distinguish between a painting that is trying to depict or say and a painting that is trying to reveal something unsayable. Concealment is necessary to preserve an efficacious mystery.’ (Matthew writing on his website.) A carn is a pile of rocks made by walkers and climbers, often on a hill top. Mr. Hannigan is someone Matthew had a lot of time for, often to be found hanging from a cliff face on the Cornish coast or writing poetry. 24
Drift, 2012 Oil and gold leaf on glass 24” x 36”
This is one of only a handful of Matthew’s paintings on glass. The title suggests Drift reservoir in West Penwith, spanned by a walk way which he crossed for the last time in the year this was painted. There is beauty and promise in the painting but it also seems to reflect the liquid in the eye of memory. Alternatively it may refer to something less tangible and more remote.
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Write Me a Few Short Lines, She Said.
Tiny glass vials, corked behind glass, each label inscribed individually with his tiny writing. Matthew was attracted and moved by the power of multiples. The words are fragments from things heard, overheard, used, imagined, read, or spoken – they transcend authorship. The piece is almost like sculpture. The arrangement of text moves at times towards dialogue between a male and female, struggling out of the random into storytelling. It could be read as a self portrait, in which he explored how he experiences time and relationship. Lanyon produced his first small bottles piece in 1996 based on his own poem, and some old homeopathic bottles. He became an avid collector of bottles and language, producing a number of pieces until 2014. The result is something akin to an expanding visual diary of language which acts as remedy; as in take two ‘long tall sallies’: the healing arts.
Write Me a Few Short Lines, She Said, 2014 Corked vials glass case 43.63”x 43.13” 26