Situated on the most easterly point of St. Ives Bay, Godrevy faces squarely out onto the Atlantic Ocean, its prominent lighthouse a marker of human intervention and presence on an otherwise rocky island beaten by waves and wind, and shaped by the slow passage of time. This sense of the elemental and the geological profoundly shaped Peter Lanyon’s relationship to the land - and specifically to Cornwall, where he was born in 1918 – and directly informed his approach to painting. With its characteristically rich surface texture, vertiginous collapse of multiple perspectives and tonal vibrancy Godrevy is a striking example of Lanyon’s unique notion of ‘experimental landscape’ which he developed from the 1940s onwards.

For Lanyon, the landscapes that we situate ourselves within are never experienced passively, but have their own textures and history, and directly involve our bodies as we orient ourselves within them. Lanyon walked, climbed, swan, cycled and glided all across Cornwall. He read about the history and mythologies of the place and rooted his own personal biography to it. He also poured all of this into his paintings, believing that “landscape, the outside world of things and events larger than ourselves is the proper place to find our deepest meaning” (Peter Lanyon, Some Aspects in Modern British Painting: an Artist’s Point of View, lecture for the British Council in Czechoslovakia, 27th January 1964).

This sense of deep immersion - of knowing a subject from every angle - is immediately apparent in the present work where several different spatial perspective are combined, the vertical white section of the lighthouse seen frontally blended with the flatly arial perspective of the vibrantly rendered island and narrow strip of the ocean beyond. Just like the layers of sedimentary rock and mudstone which give Godrevy its particular geological identity, the surface of the painting is similarly built up of layers of impasto worked over a Masonite board, which Lanyon has scraped back and cut into with a palette knife, creating complex surface textures and a sense of weather-beaten vitality as the underlying layers are revealed.

While we tend to read Lanyon’s work in the context of Abstract Expressionism, he certainly also saw himself as a painter of landscapes in the romantic tradition. Indeed, despite its distillation to the constitutive elements of colour, spatial arrangement and texture, Godrevy still powerfully evokes a representational sense of place. As John Berger identified of Lanyon’s landscapes more generally: