Peter Lanyon – Untitled Cliff Face

Direct from the Estate.
Will’s Lane Gallery, St. Ives.
Private Collection

This work was all painted in the few years of intense creativity after Lanyon looked up one day while walking along a Cornish clifftop, saw three gliders pass silently overhead, and pledged to join them. He began gliding seriously in 1959, and first flew solo a year later, clocking up hundreds of flying hours until August 1964, when he died in hospital in Taunton.

 

“Without this urgency of the cliff-face or of the sea air which I meet alone, I am impotent. I think this is why I paint the weather and high places where solids and fluids meet.” Peter Lanyon