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Lot Essay
In November 1956, a few weeks after finishing Sand Bar, Peter Lanyon wrote to his friend Roland Bowden:
'If I set out to paint high ground sky and sun or a sea storm or a black ebb tide, the subject itself has no set of identities, it is nearer an entity and in painting it a much more particular thing is revealed – a direct sensuous apprehension of particular involvement together with a generalised weather of the heart. …. I think of painting as an event not a site for a set of events defined and separated by spatial absences but one event every side of which is presented or revealed all together at once and immediately. The impact blows from the painting to you, it clutches and sucks or stretches, it may tickle in order to convey to you ‘a presence’ such as any word ringing true.'
Sand Bar takes it title from those long ribbons of sand that move in the shallows of the coast, propelled by the tides. They can leave overnight or stay for centuries, as at Loe Bar in West Cornwall, where an arm of sand and shingle has smothered a river mouth since the thirteenth century; on one side a lake, on the other the battering sea. Lanyon painted Loe Bar in 1962.
In Sand Bar the thin ridge of sand runs vertically up the middle: solid at the top and fraying towards the bottom. Across the painting Lanyon evokes a winter sea and harrying wind through colour, texture, and an astonishing range of marks and densities. He had been painting the landscape in this way since the early 1950s, constantly expanding the technique’s expressive range as he tried to capture the experience of being in, subject to and part of the forces that were so alive for him in the westernmost part of Cornwall, his lifelong home.
In 1956 a deeply personal subtext entered these paintings. For a long time Lanyon had thought of the sea as male and the land as female, and the shore as the point of their meeting. Earlier in the year he painted Lulworth (Albright-Knox Art Gallery) ‘after a year of intense and painful attachment to a muse of great potency’ (Letter to Roland Bowden, 9 April 1956). In that painting two entwined figures, a man and a woman, are abstracted and embedded in Lulworth Cove on the Dorset coast. He called it a ‘Betrothal’ (Lanyon alphabetical record book). The muse was the subject of many paintings over the coming years. Lanyon called them the Susan series. Their extent is not known, but on his death in 1964 Lanyon’s widow, Sheila wrote Susan a letter in which she said that half the paintings would not have happened without her. Though Sand Bar is not one of the pictures that Lanyon specifically identified as of the series, the presence of two figures within the tumult of the painting, facing one another on either side of the vertical strip, is consonant with the theme of a powerful love.
Toby Treves
We are very grateful to Toby Treves for his assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.
'If I set out to paint high ground sky and sun or a sea storm or a black ebb tide, the subject itself has no set of identities, it is nearer an entity and in painting it a much more particular thing is revealed – a direct sensuous apprehension of particular involvement together with a generalised weather of the heart. …. I think of painting as an event not a site for a set of events defined and separated by spatial absences but one event every side of which is presented or revealed all together at once and immediately. The impact blows from the painting to you, it clutches and sucks or stretches, it may tickle in order to convey to you ‘a presence’ such as any word ringing true.'
Sand Bar takes it title from those long ribbons of sand that move in the shallows of the coast, propelled by the tides. They can leave overnight or stay for centuries, as at Loe Bar in West Cornwall, where an arm of sand and shingle has smothered a river mouth since the thirteenth century; on one side a lake, on the other the battering sea. Lanyon painted Loe Bar in 1962.
In Sand Bar the thin ridge of sand runs vertically up the middle: solid at the top and fraying towards the bottom. Across the painting Lanyon evokes a winter sea and harrying wind through colour, texture, and an astonishing range of marks and densities. He had been painting the landscape in this way since the early 1950s, constantly expanding the technique’s expressive range as he tried to capture the experience of being in, subject to and part of the forces that were so alive for him in the westernmost part of Cornwall, his lifelong home.
In 1956 a deeply personal subtext entered these paintings. For a long time Lanyon had thought of the sea as male and the land as female, and the shore as the point of their meeting. Earlier in the year he painted Lulworth (Albright-Knox Art Gallery) ‘after a year of intense and painful attachment to a muse of great potency’ (Letter to Roland Bowden, 9 April 1956). In that painting two entwined figures, a man and a woman, are abstracted and embedded in Lulworth Cove on the Dorset coast. He called it a ‘Betrothal’ (Lanyon alphabetical record book). The muse was the subject of many paintings over the coming years. Lanyon called them the Susan series. Their extent is not known, but on his death in 1964 Lanyon’s widow, Sheila wrote Susan a letter in which she said that half the paintings would not have happened without her. Though Sand Bar is not one of the pictures that Lanyon specifically identified as of the series, the presence of two figures within the tumult of the painting, facing one another on either side of the vertical strip, is consonant with the theme of a powerful love.
Toby Treves
We are very grateful to Toby Treves for his assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.