Coda for an Obol

It was, to be a dutiful day bending light, so before sunrise, specs unfold wings and perch on the bridge to frame the eyes. A four lens focus group with a crystal clear field of vision. Summoning imagery out of paint is like harvesting scatterings from workings gone to seed. You are making new adaptations of old compositions; fossicking through abandoned structures and noodling around in the mist in search of gold, it is fun, but a serious business to endure. Art historian Rudi Fuchs describes how “The paintings’ imagery grows from the material condition of the surface–preparing the spectacle.”

When Mr broken motif and Mrs empty emblem try for a baby archetype in the making, their moving bodies mold manifold shapes under canvas. Beyond base materiality, the now pregnant symbol clothes the pressure, birthing the possibility for images to be animated internally through layers. There is this underworld of methylated spirit, medium fine, heavy grit, razor blades scratching to get at the beeswax, clawing the turpentine tree, tip toeing around pools of cadmium red, flashing lead white underbellies and digging self-levelling paint for smooth bones. Here lye properties made memorable for the effect they had on one another. Defy the usual cuts, drag an oil stick across pleats off paint like tailor’s chalk, measure arm, wing, finger, feather, toe and claw, foot and paw…

Human perception is not just about seeing what is actually present in the world around us. It's also heavily influenced by our motivations and expectations. When the density of a painting reaches certain points, it behaves less like a group of individual parts and more like a fluid. Momentum rolls clean edged shapes into something, altogether, more travelled. If this inspires my invested gaze, all I ask from the worn and woven surface, is that it triggers an equal and opposite reaction in me, emboldening a fresher more invigorated vision.

A painting title leaning on association, derives from digging over the after image; The sky of 'Lycabettus’, held aloft by the heads of a doctor and nurse, shines through an x-ray inspired geological cross-section. Just below is a sunburst, bolt-action rifle butt. To the left a hot bird fans the flames of two valiant lupines centre stage. They're animated with sound lines and not knowing if they’re playing or fighting, I will call it play-fighting. It turns out the cross-section was cut and collaged from a history book on haunted rocks. In Reuben B. Frost's 'The Stones Can Speak’; "The granite on top of the Acropolis, worn smooth from millions of feet, became a history book; the rock rising above the timber line was now Mt. Lycabettus." Which translates as 'the hill that is walked by wolves’.

Décollage gets grizzly at 12,000 rpm. Inching urgently out of the sandstorm come Pac-Man power lines and gnawn out windows. From back and beyond, tracks of turquoise pigment prop up the painted walls of 'House Almeria’ like vines, but the Queen of Sheba, shrouded by her caravan of gifts, looks discontented with the genie and the hot gazpacho. My make believe morphs in and out of these paintings once made, adding up to everything and nothing - all interpretations are wildly subjective. Squashed in with abstraction and picked out with drawing, an open system in a bounded area enfolds this ambiguity. Curbing the boredom by complicating perceptual expectations.

Things appear to come and go until apotheosis arrives unannounced. I think of this moment as a form of coda. The musicologist Charles Burkhart suggests that the reason codas are necessary, is that, in the climax of a "particularly effortful passage", often an expanded phrase is created by "working an idea through to its structural conclusion" and that, after all this momentum is created, a coda is required to "look back" on the main body, and allow listeners to "take it all in", and in turn "create a sense of balance.”

Leaning in, lateral thinking helps cut the knot so both ends lead to a last and final kiss. Looking up, John Bevis' celestial maps blaze the trail, and down here, under the fringe, I've just read 242 pages on a pair of Poussin paintings as my bamboo graffiti is healing. Symbols clock-in, so flick back elephant hair like bristles on a yard brush and turn up the musical frisson. Fast forward and what is fashioned at the close becomes cursive and integrated - a paintings' ending becomes it's beginning once witnessed - straight line becomes circle as serpent swallows tail. This now serves as part of my broader vernacular for the end game. The thought of making one last drawing begs the question; what might the ferryman value in lieu of the obol? My only offer, whilst I am still here, comes from continuing to orbit this ideal in the hope of capturing something eternal.


Arthur Lanyon, June 2022

Arcade Laundry

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.

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-icarus-space-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