INSTALMENTS | Rob Lyon | Widdershins

Rob Lyon is a self-taught painter, who takes inspiration from the place where he lives - the South Downs, a ridge of chalk hills that stretch for 100 miles from Winchester to Eastbourne in the Southeast of England. It’s an area with a deep past and a sense of pilgrimage in which the footsteps of forgotten thousands have created chalk paths that zig zag through the grassy landscape, past burial mounds and neolithic monuments. 

Lyon describes how the thinking of Paul Nash, the early 20th century modernist painter, has shaped his own theories of Genius Loci, the spirit of place. In walking through this ancient landscape, he is aware how his human presence impacts his surroundings, and how the landscape, in turn, touches him. There’s a connection in this to the longer traditions of English Romanticism, specifically perhaps the visionary tendencies of artists like William Blake and Samuel Palmer whose deep engagement with landscape allowed for a metaphysical mapping of the self, as much as a physical mapping of place. For Lyon, walking and looking and thinking about this relationship is key to the process of making each painting. As he has noted:

“As my painting loosened into something more abstract, some elements of the landscape have become painterly devices. The chalk path is capable of both leading the viewer’s eye around the canvas while breaking the logic of landscape. I sometimes consider them as snakes and ladders; at once both shepherding and thwarting an eye engaged in a spiritual wander."

There’s an inherent musicality in these paintings, which nods to Lyon’s past as a musician, and a sense that the paintings have been composed and arranged.  Ultimately, they come from an interior place where colour and shapes suggest a kind of personal symbology in which pattern and rhythm are choreographed into an image, steered as much by feeling as by the specifics of design or topography.