Arthur Lanyon 'Arcade Laundry'

Arthur Lanyon - Arcade Laundry

“Everything is to be gained from
specifying the sites of thought and
making them more numerous.”
Jean Dubuffet

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After spending some time amusing myself
in the games arcade, I wandered out to
the street and crossed the zebra crossing
to the launderette aptly named ‘Arcade
Laundry’. I sat waiting for clean whites
when, quite involuntarily, my vision
distorted, reorganising itself into an
altered state, resulting from a ‘scintillating
scotoma’ - a sort of painless migraine.
It was like tuning in to an invisible data
stream that held comparative visual echoes
of the bright, colourful and gordy computer
games just played. From the street to the
sheet, inner and outer experiences were
bundled together.
The visual processing centre of the brain
sometimes functions abnormally when
adjusting to sensory stimulation such as
bright lights and noise. The field of vision
can then become distorted by a dense
and expanding blind spot which in turn
starts to flicker with activity. Some describe
designs like the ornamentation of a Norman
arch, a dog tooth moulding, ramparts of
a walled city or an aerial view of a star
fort. Other comparisons bear similarity
to Widmanstätten patterns, where figures
of long nickel–iron crystals are found in
meteorites. It also resembles battle ships
camouflaged with ‘dazzle painting’ ablaze
with crystal faced primary colours that
zig zag around cracked and molten seas of
pattern. Burning with artificial intensity
these ‘jazz’ visions, which occur without
sight, are illuminated by inner light. It
is thought that these tessellated fractals
are perhaps mirroring the inner architure
of the human brain itself and may go
some way to explain the source of the
oldest human marks we know of, perceived
now as sacred.
The ancient art of divination suggests a
deliberate practice of cultivating symbolic
imagery and using our primal faculties of
intuition and imagination to derive some
meaning from transient visual phenomena.
Hallucinatory states achieved in the ritual
practices of early humans are believed by
some researchers to have been mentally
projected and traced onto complex relief
structures like the early cave wall. The
surface of which exudes its own suggestive,
poetic sensibility that is likely to act as
a stimulus for mediumistic experiences.
From such beginnings, a wall of images
was built into our abstract consciousness,
a base of archetypal symbols that held
societal significance.
My approach to painting is to define a
sense of illumination. Often my work is
punctuated by pockets of primary colour.
The glowing orb of the sky, a circle can be
an eye or a sun, a bowl of suns or a head
of eyes. A counterpoint, a starting place
and a face. Interestingly it is the sun and
the mandala that often provide stimulus
for a childs first drawings of humans. The
formation of which begins from the core
and radiates out into peripheral limbs. This
kind of contemplation may be tightly
interrelated with explorative and playful
behavior where intention is to understand
by looking at the start of things, and
so awareness must follow action. Naivety
draws out playful lines of thinking, a
clarity of vision that is often blinded
by experience. The character of painting
is atypical to logical reasoning and like
any good conversation it comes in the
form of contrasts. Questions and marks
merely help one remember parts of a
bigger picture.
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Aged five, my drawings were abstract essences
of what I knew rather than realistic depictions
of what I saw. I would then title these works
with absolute certainty: Footsteps on a beach
with a shark approaching; The country where
Sam does live; A man with ears who walks
about on his knees and those are spectacles;
Plan for Helen’s Digger; Spray tractor with
watering machine and crossbones; Crocodile
eating all the numbers; Switch and wiring
plan; Hotwire; We don’t eat pigs; Crocodile
with water in his rucksack; A picture of
Charlie that pecked me, he wanted to go on
my back; Another dog weed in our house;
Daisy inside poppy’s tummy; Birthday party;
A man with cobwebs on his nose; Tractor
with acrobat; Helen’s grandad’s big wheel;
Dangerous mountains; Horsemarks; Hedgehog
fell into our shit bucket; Dinosaur and baby;
Steps and a church or Joan’s new window.
There is a defining place in Vietnam where
humid and dense green pinnacles of mountain
pop-up and swelter amongst flat crop plains
tethered to an oily blue sky. One of the
mountains contains ‘Paradise Cave’ which
is of vast proportions, artificially lit and big
enough for a Boeing 747 to fly through the
heart of it. A blanket of life sizzles all the
way up to a hidden hobbit sized entrance.
Plummeting temperature ensues when
following a few raggedy steps inside, then
the vista opens out and literally takes your
breath away. The sense of scale reverberates
right through you, from the ground up, right
through your feet, hitting the roof of the
skull. There is a proportion of magical realism
within this spectacle. A cathedral contained
within a mountain, the floor and the ceiling
reaching out to one another in arms of
stalagmites and stalactites. The lighting rakes
across the surface as if chipping away at the
texture of deep, buried, time and geology.
You are dancing with the shadows inside
your head and filled with a sublime sense
of magnitude and insignificance in a place
where the parameters of space can be felt as
if it were a tangible part of your own body.
My works harbour these cave-light-arcade
experiences as symbolic counterpoints but
also share similar dense and chunky motifs
of what I call ‘seilschaft’ (a climbing term
for rope-team). It feels counter-intuitive
to paint with white over light ground but
denying the clarity of contrast can actually
help to free up grand gestures. Half visible,
this undercoat cures in the sun just long
enough to gain tack. Upon which the tar-like
surface is dressed with dry pigment forming a
smooth bond which is burnished like leather.
This process covers entire surfaces of some
paintings. In a balance to define positive
and negative space I then carve, scrape
and lift out slabs of action from favourite
memories and two-faced drawings; a flaming
sun wheeled monster truck upside down as a
bowl of suns, the combined tin-man-icarusspace-car,
a praying mantis which attacked
the camera on the steps to the archaeological
site of Ancient Olympia, and two jealous
curs haunched on their hind quarters in an
intense stand-off.
The experience in ‘Arcade Laundry’ was the
trigger that’s positioned my painting practice
on a ‘zebra crossing’ like a belay between four
visual pinnacles. A progressive link between
the arcade, the scintillating scotoma, altered
states of consciousness, the mountain cave
and the essence of child’s drawing.
Arthur Lanyon, 2020
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Clay Thurch
oil, oil primer, oil stick, acrylic, charcoal powder, collage on linen
217 x 190 cm
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Beach Samba
oil, oil stick, oil primer, charcoal on linen
166 x 195 cm
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Match
oil, oil stick, charcoal, gesso, acrylic on linen
110 x 120 cm
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Bandito
oil, oil stick, acrylic, charcoal on linen
100 x 90 cm
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Cassidy
oil, oil stick, acrylic, charcoal on linen
100 x 90 cm
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Futile Escape
oil, oil stick, oil primer, charcoal powder on linen
190 x 200 cm
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Jaguar Nights
oil, oil stick, oil primer, charcoal powder on linen
190 x 200 cm
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Ti Sento
oil, oil stick, oil primer, charcoal powder on linen
190 x 230 cm
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Keep Herder
oil, oil stick, oil primer, charcoal powder on linen
195 x 200 cm
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Push Cat, Truck Nap
oil stick, charcoal powder on paper
30 x 47 cm
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Little Boxer
oil stick, charcoal powder on paper
30 x 47 cm
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Tin Man Icarus
oil stick, charcoal powder on paper
30 x 47 cm
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Tin Man, Space Car, Icarus
oil stick, charcoal powder on paper
30 x 47 cm
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Calipo Wings
oil stick, charcoal powder on paper
30 x 47 cm
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Rattle
oil stick, charcoal powder on paper
30 x 47 cm
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Tread from Delhi
oil, oil primer, acrylic, collage, charcoal on linen
190 x 260 cm
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Lapper
oil, oil stick, oil primer, charcoal powder on linen
150 x 190 cm
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Mining for Lemons
oil, oil stick, acrylic, charcoal on linen
9o x 100 cm
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Many Suns
oil, oil stick, acrylic, charcoal, collage on linen
90 x 100 cm
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Telegraph Hill
oil stick, charcoal on hand made paper
59 x 41 cm
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Dolly Corner
oil stick, charcoal on hand made paper
76 x 56 cm
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Morris Bulb
oil stick, charcoal on hand made paper
76 x 56 cm
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Nose Thief
oil stick, charcoal on hand made paper
76 x 56 cm
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Barko
oil, oil stick, oil primer, collage, charcoal powder on linen
170 x 270 cm
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Trunk of Blue
oil, oil stick, oil primer, charcoal powder on linen
150 x 190 cm
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Tractor with Acrobat
oil, oil stick, acrylic, gesso, charcoal powder on panel
62 x 47 cm
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Keys
oil stick, acrylic on panel
61 x 46 cm
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Four Candles
oil, oil stick, charcoal, collaged paper on panel
61 x 46 cm
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Gemshorn
oil, oil stick, charcoal, collaged paper on panel
61 x 46 cm
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Paradise Cave
oil, oil stick, oil primer, charcoal powder on linen
200 x 190 cm
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Broken Hours
oil, oil stick, oil primer, charcoal powder on linen
190 x 145 cm
5248

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Rink-Rik
oil, oil stick, oil primer, charcoal powder on linen
160 x 120 cm
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L Before M
oil stick, ink on paper
59 x 42 cm
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Spa Day
oil stick, ink, charcoal powder on paper
59 x 42 cm
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Cannon
oil stick, ink on paper
42 x 59 cm
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Corner Shop
oil stick, ink, charcoal powder on paper
42 x 59 cm
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Tin Man
oil, oil stick, oil primer, spray paint, wax, charcoal powder on linen
195 x 250 cm
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Caped Crusader
oil stick, charcoal on panel
46 x 61 cm
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Running Shop
oil, oil stick, charcoal, collaged paper on panel
46 x 61 cm
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Two Thoughts
oil, oil primer, acrylic, spray paint on panel
47 x 61 cm
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Horsemarks
oil stick, charcoal, collage on panel
49 x 61 cm
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Gone Fishing
oil, oil stick, acrylic, collage, charcoal on panel
74 x 61 cm
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A Man With a Cobweb on His Nose
oil, oil stick, oil primer, charcoal powder on linen
45 x 50 cm
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Gold Tap
oil, oil stick, acrylic, gesso, charcoal powder on linen
58 x 68 cm
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Two Moon Keeper
oil, oil primer, oil stick, charcoal on panel
62 x 58 cm
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Token Man
oil stick, charcoal powder on paper
30 x 47 cm
Giants Head
oil stick, charcoal powder on paper
30 x 47 cm
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Doors that Bind
oil stick, charcoal powder on paper
30 x 47 cm
The Muskats Mother
oil stick, charcoal powder on paper
30 x 47 cm
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Arthur Lanyon is a British artist born
in Leicester, England in 1985. He
lives and works from a studio near
Penzance, Cornwall.
Born in to an artistic family, his father
was the painter Matthew Lanyon and his
grandfather the celebrated, influential and
world renowned modernist painter Peter
Lanyon. He won the Hans Brinker Painting
Award in Amsterdam in 2007 and gained a
first class degree in Fine Art from Cardiff
University in 2008. Upon graduating he
was featured in Saatchi’s ‘New Sensations’
exhibition. In 2014, his work was in the
long-list for the Aesthetica Art Prize and was
included in the award’s published anthology.
His debut Anima Mundi solo exhibition
‘Return to Whale’ opened in 2016, which
was followed by ‘White Chalk Lines in
2018. His latest exhibition ‘Arcade Laundry’
opens in 2020. Works have been exhibited
extensively notably including Untitled Art
Fair in Miami; Zona Maco, Mexico City; the
Saatchi Gallery London; The House of St
Barnabas, London; CGK, Copenhagen; Tat
Art, Barcelona and Herrick Gallery, Mayfair.
Arthur Lanyon paintings are held in private
collections worldwide. He is represented by
Anima Mundi.

Published by Anima Mundi to coincide with Arthur Lanyon ‘Arcade Laundry’
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