The British painter Arthur Lanyon was born into a family of artists. His father was the painter Matthew Lanyon, while his grandfather was the renowned modernist artist Peter Lanyon. “There was a lot of art everywhere, so it came naturally, I didn’t really think about it,” he says. He recalls one specific memory that illustrates his childhood. “I remember when I was little, my father came in one day and said: ‘I’ve got something I need to draw today,’ and he put a big bucket full of snails in the middle of the table, and they crawled out around the edge,” he says. “It was quite exciting as a little kid, to get involved in all that.”
Lanyon, 37, spent his first two years in Leicester before the family relocated to Cornwall, where he still lives in a house built by his parents near Penzance. His paintings often combine figurative motifs with an emotive, gestural abstraction.
