Mathew Lanyon 1951--2016

Matthew Lanyon, who has died of cancer aged 65, was a Cornish painter whose passion for the landscape and cultural legacy of his beloved county ran as vibrantly as ore through his work. He made an immeasurable contribution to the art of the region.

His first major solo show, at the Rainy Day Gallery in Penzance in 2007, included a painting seven metres long entitled Journey to the Stars. In recent years, he continued to push the scale of his paintings towards the truly monumental, and had begun to experiment with architectural glass and tapestry. His final exhibition, In the Tracks of the Yellow Dog, held at the New Craftsman Gallery in St Ives in September, dealt with the grief he felt following his mother’s death in 2015. It was one of several exhibitions on which I had the pleasure of working with him.

Born in St Ives, Matthew was the third of six children of the painter Peter Lanyon and his wife, Sheila St John Browne. His father was a leading light of the postwar St Ives group, alongside artists such as Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo; consequently, Matthew was raised amid the artistic and intellectual atmosphere of British modernism.

Despite winning the art prize at Penzance grammar school as a child, he was discouraged from studying art, and went to Leicester University to take geology initially, and later linguistics and archaeology. After university, he travelled, and in 1976 met Suzanne Brown – with whom he later had a son, Arthur – and returned to Cornwall. He worked for some years as a joiner, but in his mid-30s gave in to the pressing desire to paint. He said: “It was not until 1988 that I began to take my artwork seriously. At that time, I was drawing and painting every morning with my son, in the days before he went to school. Between my father and my son, I had begun to address the problem of what anything is, or is meant to be, in a painting.”

A copy of Homer’s The Iliad given to him as a child, the “wondrous” blackboard diagrams drawn by his school geology teacher, Kipling’s Just So stories read to him at bedtime by his mother, the untimely death of his father in a gliding accident in 1964, and a practised manual skill were all influences in a lifetime of creativity, during which he conjured up satirical china plates, poetry, paintings, buildings, gardens and three-dimensional artworks.

Those who knew Matthew regarded him as a vivid, almost Shakespearean character, a man of intelligence and humour whose unique take on both life and landscape is apparent in his work.

Suzanne, whom he married in 2006, died in 2007. Matthew married his partner of eight years, Judith (nee Hodgkinson), earlier this year, and she and Arthur survive him.

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