More so than perhaps any of the St Ives artists, Peter Lanyon was most intimately connected to the Cornish landscape; travelling through it by foot, motorbike and then glider, he transcribed his experience of it onto canvas. As the artist Patrick Heron put it, Lanyon’s painting was informed by the ‘up-and-downess of a path: the sliding-pastness of a house, rock or hill as he rides along: the going thoroughness of a gap between rocks [1]’ Lanyon’s involvement in the landscape is perfectly captured in Inshore Fishing. The forms of a cove, ship, sail and net are all present but abstracted and distributed across the surface of the work. The composition is layered and complex with strands of colour sweeping through a grey Cornish sea-like flowing fonds of seaweed or the tangled mesh of fisherman’s nets. The palette is that of his native Cornwall, white froth racing over sea and stone, with hints of green and turquoise glimpsed through swathes of darker paint. After having recently finished Inshore Fishing in 1953, Lanyon stated that he had ‘just completed a landscape of net and grey sea with plenty of room to wander in brilliant colours but with just enough dirt to make it sensible[2]’

Inshore Fishing is an excellent example of Lanyon’s mature technique, developed in 1952, of grinding and mixing the pigments himself. He used these paints to build up many layers creating an all over ground which he would then incise and work into using scrappers and knives. There is a water like fluidity to the paint as well as a roughness reminiscent of the hard, physical labour required of the fisherman who worked along this cost.

In works such as Inshore Fishing we see Lanyon at his most evocative: by deftly reducing the landscape to an abstracted amalgam of sea, rock and net, he transcends mere representation and captures the very essence of the place, demonstrating an intensely-felt communion with the land which is quite unique.

[1] Patrick Heron, ‘Art News and Review’, 6 March 1954, found in Peter Lanyon Paintings, Plymouth, 1955
[2] Peter Lanyon, letter to Rowland Bowden, 23 July 1953, found in Andrew Lanyon, St Ives: The Paintings of Peter Lanyon, 2001