I first came across Peter Lanyon's paintings over ten years ago. At the time I had a conundrum, I was looking at a career in the visual arts but my natural affinity was with moving in the world, not looking at it. My only arena for this was ballet and I was awful at it, my teacher often having to disguise her horror at my imprecise joy in throwing myself around. There were no release based contemporary dance classes on the Isle of Wight where I had grown up or things may have been different. I spent a lot of time outdoors on the beach and I wanted to paint how it felt to physically be in landscape, rather than what it looked like viewed from a fixed point. Lanyon did just that and I felt such an affinity with him that at 18, I made a decision. I moved 300 miles away from home to experience what he had, paint what he had, and immerse myself in his homeland, Cornwall. I was subsequently reffered to by critic Max Andrews in  New York Arts Magazine as part of the St.Ives New School (read the article here). Tate St. Ives has recently held a restrospective of Lanyon's work called Peter Lanyon, which ran from October 2010 to the end of January 2011.

So why am I writing about this for dancers? If you have been following this series you will know that I now make movement as well as visual art. Furthermore Lanyon was interested above all in movement, and his articulation of sensation and the effects of gravity on the human body are something that I think many dancers who have studied contemporary techniques will relate to. The friend that I went to see the retrospective with, a painter and designer/ maker for interdisciplinary theatre, was struck by how odd it was for a man so preoccupied with movement to have chosen painting as his media of choice. Lanyon was interested in exploring 'forces greater than ourselves'. On flying a glider plane he observed that 'sitting in the air you are sitting in all dimensions'. Lanyon developed an abstracted visual language to express sensations, the idea of becoming a bird or to articulate the way air moves up the cliff.  

These are all plainly recognisable as movement themes. Those of us trained to be aware of what is happening in our bodies from minute to minute will know that the experience of walking up a hill happens as much in ones core and legs as in ones eyes. Your posture shifts as you begin the incline, you feel the muscles work as you reach the brim, and finally there is a different sort of pull in your stomach and dizziness which pulls you towards the ground as you look over the edge of the cliff. This is all physical information, coming from the body as a whole, not just the eyes looking out over a view. This was exactly what Lanyon was doing everyday to inform his work, he experienced the landscape by tramping through it, whizzing round on his bicycle (sketch book tied to the handle bars) and soaring in the glider plane, which tragically was to be the end of him when he crashed in 1964. 

Lanyon articulated gravity, the effects of altitude and turbulence on the body, as someone who had really felt these sensations. He recreated what he had experienced so that the viewer too can feel the jolt as the plan drops through the air and thuds against the next thermal. 

All of the shapes in Lanyon's paintings and constructions are off kilter and unstable. If they were to exist in real space and were they not fixed by glue, very rarely would they balance at all without momentum applied to them. He wanted your eyes to move across the surface of the work as it would when following a bird across the sky. Looking at his work is an active experience, the solidity of the paintings and objects is virtually unnoticeable as you circle your eyes and body around his works, bending, leaning, ducking to peer through things. The resulting dance around the work brings to mind some of William Forsythe’s Choreographic Objects. During a recent talk at MOVE: Choreographing You at the Hayward Gallery, he described these as objects that make the viewer do a certain 'choreography' when experiencing them. Sometimes making the viewer move in a certain pattern around them (to be discussed further in a future article).

In the centre of each gallery were selected constructions that Lanyon made to explore ideas and then as a secondary subject to paint from. To me it seems that in these constructions he was pinning down his physical experience down, catching it and converting it into a tangible static, form so that the could understand it before translating it into painting in his characteristically dynamic way. A process of solidifying a physical experience to be able to articulate it and then dissolving it again into movement  the action of painting), having got to grips with it, very similar to the way that one might watch movement material back on a camcorder to see what has come out of an improvisation.   

So to return to my friend’s point, why did he choose painting, why not film? Lanyon lived in Cornwall, surrounded by the fishing and mining industries that were in decline. He felt that commercial painting was really the only viable option for him. Inspired by cosmopolitan artists Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, who had fled to the safety of Cornwall during the war, he decided to make a go of it.   

As I started out heavily under the influence of Lanyon, and then trained in dance later on to deepen my research, I left the show wondering if movement is my subject matter or my form? It seems to play a part in both, each art form giving opportunities that the other does not. I recently met Martin Creed, during The Big Intensive for Choreographers at Sadler's Wells (supported by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation), who said that he chose visual art because it seemed to encompass everything, with the broadest most flexible set of rules. He has also recently been collaborating with dance people, making a work about ballet, in which he obsessively orders and structures movement patterns, in the same way as he is well know for doing with objects. If Lanyon had worked with dance people, I think he would have been in release based contemporary class, rolling, sliding and twisting in space like a ball tossed on the sea, following the flow, swing and momentum of the bodies centre of gravity shifting as it travels through space.  

I could spend hours experiencing the momentum of a turn, a change of direction mid air, the exhilaration of a barrel jump, the shape and form this creates in my body has begun to sneak into my art work. Geometry has appeared for the first time, twists, rolls of pliable material, tension and knots, things in counterbalance against one another, objects on the brink of collapse only held together by tenuous balance, like a mass of small objects held together in a shoal as they undulate through the swell. My two creative languages seem to be developing in conversation with each other, I am bilingual it seems. Perhaps in this multicultural age, this quirky position of never quite fitting in, is more relevant than ever.  

Alexis also has a blog:  www.encounterproject.blogspot.com and a website: www.alexiszeldastevens.com