The most important fact for everybody was that Peter Lanyon was there and that he existed. He was a kind of yardstick by which we could all measure our own achievements and our own integrity. He helped many young artists financially with materials and particularly with advice. He never had any secrets, technically, he would spare any amount of time and he would also visit them to see their latest work and to encourage them. One remarkable thing about him was the way in which he could see ahead of a person’s development. He was a brilliant, an absolutely brilliant teacher because he could find solutions to problems that were facing the artist that the artist would never have dreamed of – they were solutions which would help him to develop and solutions which were peculiar to him. They weren’t Peter Lanyon’s own solutions, they were solutions which the artist would himself have arrived at in due course. And this, of course, is the quality of a really great teacher: that he doesn’t impose his own… his own character and his own… um, style upon the student. The fact that several…that a number of people did paint in a Lanyonesque manner was no reflection on Lanyon himself because he was a heroic figure himself in many ways and the sort of person that one could either hero-worship or dislike intensely. And many people perhaps who felt his influence was very strong disliked him because of this. He always took an oblique viewpoint to things when he was in discussion, he would always take this unusual and oblique line which would result in the end in a very unusual and creative solution to something. In the same way when he was looking at things and out looking around the landscape he took a curiously oblique angle of approach to it and this resulted in him seeing things that other people couldn’t see at all.

Very few people ever saw Peter at work in his studio. The studio was very much bespattered with paint because he worked with great frenzy at times. People seemed to imagine that some of the pictures more recently – because of the fluid way in which they were painted – were rather knocked off. But this could never have been the case because Peter was always a slow worker and after a long bout of painting of possibly two or three weeks, or two or three months, he would emerge as a public figure again but looking pale and really ill. I think painting took a tremendous amount out of him.

There was a strong exhibitionist element but one was never quite certain whether this was exhibition or whether this was just him. I remember on one occasion we went for a walk into the countryside and he would insist on standing on his head and looking through a gate at the landscape. But this did give him a new view of the landscape by doing this sort of thing.

I think it was partially exhibitionistic at that particular moment but there was no doubt that at some time he had looked upside down at the landscape and then seen the landscape in a new way. And on this particular occasion it was… it was rather interesting because we had visited a Bronze Age village and afterwards I painted a picture of this and called it something like “Celtic Twilight” but my picture was really very literal – a kind of cross section through the ground with graves – but Peter’s picture was called “High Country” and showed a long meandering shape that went up the picture and which expressed much more the kind of high country that we’d been in, and it derived in part at any rate from a long road – a long meandering road that we’d gone up and afterwards I was surprised and astounded that I hadn’t been able to see that this was the thing that would really produce a picture which would give much more [of a] feeling of the place.

I think there was a very st… peculiar and strong relationship between him and Cornwall itself – in fact after his death one felt very strongly that Peter was Cornwall and was the Cornish landscape.

PETER LANYON AS SCULPTOR >