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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. On the spirit of poetry in a time of plague by Richard Berengarten
2. More trouble with genre. Markku Nivalainen in conversation with Simon Collings
3. Plum Pudding books: Anthony Howell reviews Michael Hampton and Marius Kociejowski
4. Why I am not a philosopher, or The Annoyances of Philosophy, by Alan Wall.
5. ‘oracle’ and ‘Mary Does Laugh’. By Kate Ashton
6. Of Peace and Strife by W.D. Jackson, illustrated by Alan Dixon. A verse-column
7. J’accuse…injustement, Anthony Howell considers Stephen Glascoe’s account of being falsely accused
8. Passion, framed by silence. Michelene Wandor reviews James Runcie.
9. The Hills and the Desert: Claude Vigée and Edmond Jabès, by Anthony Rudolf.
10. ‘A Way to Dismantle’ and four more poems by Ion Corcos.
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych | Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause, Dreamt Affections and Blind Summits
Previously: More below. Scroll down.
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2016: The Survival Manual by Alan Macfarlane. In eight parts.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein.
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Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
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Prohibition’s ‘original Progressives’.
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Peter Lanyon’s ‘Soaring Flight’.
A FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW OF
Soaring Flight:
Peter Lanyon’s Gliding Paintings
Courtauld Gallery | Somerset House, Strand, London WC2
15 October 2015 – 17 January 2016
By DAVID NOWELL SMITH.
Click to enlarge the image.
AS IF SUPERIMPOSED over whites and pale blues, thick red brushstrokes sketch out a vaguely rectangular shape—the route, we are told, of Peter Lanyon’s (1918-64) first solo flight in a glider. Inside this red frame-within-a-frame, spots of impasto white jut outwards, ochres and beiges scratch through to the surface, whilst diagonal and swirled strokes of pale blue offset the large vertical and horizontal sweeps of red; turn your eyes downwards and you encounter dull green shards, as though earth seen through the clouds; at the edges the paintwork scuffs and fragments, leaving the board visible beneath, as though embodying the precariousness of weight—of a body, as Lanyon described it, borne by a ‘sense of solitary quietness and sharp awareness of the substance of the ground below’.
Lanyon’s late paintings are choreographies of pigment on canvas; they set in motion thermals and updraughts, collide different perspectives against one another…
How are we to read these marks, the swathes and accumulations of colour and movement that characterise Solo Flight (1960), and so many other of Lanyon’s gliding paintings brought together in Soaring Flight? To call him an ‘abstract’ painter seems wrong: the pictorial gestures are too motivated. The curators of Soaring Flight continually invite us to read the paintings as representational, with individual elements associated tentatively with a particular geographical feature. Lanyon himself observed that, without his realising it, specific visual references would crop up in his paintings, which he would notice only after the fact. But more than constructing landscapes, these paintings seek to inhabit space, and invite their beholder to inhabit the painting’s own pictorial space in their turn. ‘I paint places’, he wrote, ‘but always the Placeness of them… And my aim as far as I can see it is to make a face an “actuality” or “thingness” for experience. To present for sensory experience a face.’ A ‘face’ for sensory experience, says Lanyon; these ‘faces’ are themselves no less sensory, responding to the brute physical experience of the glider with a sensuality of their own. Lanyon’s late paintings are choreographies of pigment on canvas; they set in motion thermals and updraughts, collide different perspectives against one another, so as to ‘scape’, as it were, land and sky.
GLIDING TRANSFORMED LANYON as both landscape painter and as inheritor from cubism. It afforded a different means of mapping the Penwith peninsula of West Cornwall where he lived most of his life, and which was the abiding inspiration for his painting. The late 1950s had already seen major shifts in his colour palette and composition in late 50s: his most celebrated paintings from the early 50s, such as Botallack and St Just, use thick, impasto grey-greens, cut into by the artist’s scalpel to evoke the scars left by tin mining on the land. The density of these early works is at times suffocating, leaving us gasping for air; little wonder, perhaps, that Lanyon should turn his attentions from earth to sky, to lighter paint application and a composition far more diffuse. At the same time, Lanyon took advantage of a different sensation of speed, a different view of earth and sky, so as to blend the layering and juxtaposition of perspective so prevalent in these early works with a reimmersion in sensual experience. The drama of the gliding paintings lies in the encounter of a finite, frail body with the multiplication of perspectives, of intimacy with power.
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David Nowell Smith is Lecturer in Poetry and Poetics in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. His most recent book is On Voice in Poetry: The Work of Animation (Palgrave, 2015; US readers).
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Publication: Monday, 30 November 2015, at 19:16.
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