ABSTRACT
Lanyon made more drawings of places than any other category; they insistently remind us that he was fundamentally a landscape painter. While the terms 'place7 and 'landscape7 are often understood to denote very different perceptions - a place is limited in area, well defined verbally and visually and eminently mappable, as opposed to a landscape's seemingly unbounded openness that may be explained differently by every person who passes through it - landscape habitually incorporates places. Lanyon was clear that he was concerned with depicting places, whether of natural or human origin. Holiday Coast (1963; Plate 2), Walls and Fields (1963; Figure 18), sketches of Bosigran, coastal cliffs and the moors are among numerous examples of natural places, though, as in the Study for St Just (Figure 34), the natural often provides the setting for a human artefact. Robustly scornful of paintings of 'views', he assigned precise titles to his paintings, often using a place-name, though the titles of the gliding paintings refer to weather conditions and the activity itself.
