ABSTRACT
He drew places more consistently than any other subject: it was, as it were, his default mode, to which he constantly returned. Towards the end of the war, in Italy, he made some conventional portraits and landscape paintings, but in terms of his development they are less informative than the small watercolour Planes and Houses, Naples (1944; Plate 1). While its compositional arrangement was an important new departure, this drawing is also an early example of the synthesis of memory and the literal about which he later wrote to John Wells. The perception of space that Lanyon began to develop in Planes and Houses is best described as experiential: not only is there no single viewpoint, but the viewpoint is constantly mobile, suggesting the artist's own mobile, sentient presence at the core of the image. By setting down more than it was physically possible to see, Lanyon went far beyond a recording role in this image, though he very vividly evoked the experience of being in a heavily bombed town.
