“Three Gliders [after High Ground by Peter Lanyon]”

2021/22 [NFS]

[oil on panel 60cm x 51cm]

Extract from “Biography” [in Studio Notes]:

One day in 1956 whilst walking on the beach at Perranporth, a few miles from his home in Carbis Bay, [renowned Cornish artist Peter Lanyon] watched three gliders soaring above the cliffs to the west. He took this scene and painted “High Ground” [1956]. This painting combined the solid with the evanescent and contained the strong diagonal that would go on to become a central compositional feature of his later work; “the diagonal lifts me from the ground into the sky.... I saw three gliders over a cliff and decided to go up there myself.”

It is likely that my father [Harry Hooper] was piloting one of the gliders that Lanyon had observed on that day in ‘56 ………… a moment that not only heralded an evolutionary step in Peter Lanyon's painting practice but would influence the evolution of abstract painting more generally.