ARTHUR LANYON
A MOON WITH A VIEW

Arthur Lanyon is a British artist born in Leicester, England in 1985. He lives and works from a studio near Penzance, Cornwall. Born in to an artistic family, his father was the painter Matthew Lanyon and his grandfather the celebrated, influential and world renowned modernist painter Peter Lanyon. He won the Hans Brinker Painting Award in Amsterdam in 2007 and gained a first class degree in Fine Art from Cardiff University in 2008. Upon graduating he was featured in Saatchi’s ‘New Sensations’ exhibition. In 2014, his work was in the long-list for the Aesthetica Art Prize and was included in the award’s published anthology. His debut Anima Mundi solo exhibition ‘Return to Whale’ opened in 2016, which was followed by ‘White Chalk Lines in 2018, ‘Arcade Laundry’ in 2020 and ‘Coda for an Obol’ in 2022. Works have been exhibited extensively, notably including Untitled Art Fair in Miami; Zona Maco, Mexico City; the Saatchi Gallery London; The House of St Barnabas, London; CGK, Copenhagen; Tat Art, Barcelona and Herrick Gallery, Mayfair. Arthur Lanyon paintings are held in private collections worldwide.

My mood board is full of little drawings and photocopied things. Rory’s drawings are there and also mine from when I was a boy. A childhood drawing can filter through your system like ‘chinese whispers’ and come out as something new. Call it an unfamiliar knowing. Using a little pencil sketch is like consuming myself. It is strangely intimate because the nature of the mind seems to expand inwards to a place that cannot be found in the world of objects. A 4 metre painting is also a type of mood board.

In my studio a skeleton sits at a table hunched over a copy of Gray’s Anatomy. A skeleton looking at skeletons. It looks like some serious self-enquiry has come to an end. The still-life of bones poses all sorts of abstract questions. They get answered simply with paint.

I work in a polytunnel under a thin sheet of polythene pulled tight over 12 thick metal hoops. Outside, heavy rain drum-rolls a roof that is like the rib-cage of a whale. Inside, drips form quietly before they drop. Between all the ribs is a sort of echo-chamber where I paint, wet-in-wet, with two brushes and both hands. How autonomous the motion feels. It’s like flossing a nerve from each side or combing the center parting of a scattered mind. It runs one way and then in reverse. You can switch what each hand is doing – one can mirror the other or wait and watch as the other moves. I look at the skeleton, the book, the roof, and focus on the gap between things. Sometimes I forget to breathe because it seems I am holding my breath for something else.

A painting emerges when two opposite structures begin to contain and accept each other. It doesn’t always behave badly like a goat and its tether (strung together in this sentence). It’s more of a marriage, like the roots of the Banyan tree both pushing apart and holding together the stones of the temple of Angkor Wat. All manner of things materialize as the mind works to create equilibrium. The value of painting is that a good deal of thinking can gradually surface.

Rory’s drawing entered a painting. Out of the blue, a circle of bare canvas rests beside a vertical divide, a tree trunk, topped with a blob of autumnal tinged green. Owl wingbeats spread flight patterns through the air of the painting. It is called ‘Moon with a View’.


Arthur Lanyon, June 2024