In Peter Lanyon’s gliding painting Still Air, the interaction of whiteness and colour suggests the relationship between the ground below and a numinous body of cloud above that conceals and envelopes. The painting was developed using colour, mostly off-primary contrasts between deep blue and warm, ochre yellow, before a skein of white paint was applied wet-on-wet near the surface. The dominant motif, a stream of downward yellow brushstrokes, along with other ribbon-like forms, may suggest the progress of the artist’s glider through the skies. Lanyon was acutely interested by a glider’s sensation of air masses rising and falling, and the title ‘Still Air’ evokes a qualitative subject—the artist’s experience of gliding in static air conditions. The phrase ‘still air’ is a commonplace of aeronautics and means there is no wind and no vertical air motion. The calm atmosphere and serene whiteness of the canvas in Still Air may suggest the glider’s perspective looking outwards and downwards from inside the air mass. As with other paintings made in 1959 and later, when Lanyon was gliding, Still Air reflects Lanyon’s enhanced perspective of the interaction between land, sea and air.

The paintings of Peter Lanyon often communicate an experience of landscape. ‘My concern’, he once said, ‘is not to produce pure shape or colour on a surface, but to inform and fill up every mark with information which comes directly from the world in which I live.’ He was intimately connected to Cornwall, and his friend the art historian Alan Bowness described him as ‘a fanatical Cornishman, […] always held in the spell of the remote and mysterious landscape of West Cornwall, to which so many of his best pictures pay tribute.’ Lanyon often gave surprisingly literal descriptions of his paintings, identifying certain features with specific attributes in the landscape—a track, a body of air, the movement of a gull in flight, an area of red to indicate a glider’s path—while also using ‘suggestions of human forms’. His mentor Naum Gabo wrote that Lanyon ‘used [the abstract world] in his painting only as a means to convey his vision of the naturalistic world.’

Lanyon began gliding as a hobby in 1959. He described Solo Flight (1960, National Galleries of Scotland) as ‘one of the first pictures done after I had learned to glide and fly around the coast.’ Gliding produced profound and lasting changes in his painting: it brought him closer to the elements he had been painting at ground level, the qualities of weather and the movement of air; and it afforded him a privileged perspective of the landscape below. He explained his motive for the pursuit:

"The whole purpose of gliding was to get a more complete knowledge of the landscape, and the pictures now combine the elements of land, sea and sky—earth, air and water. I had always watched birds in flight exploring the landscape, moving more freely than man can, but in a glider I was similarly placed."

The art historian Andrew Causey in turn gave this account of how gliding informed Lanyon’s work:

"Gliding was a sensuous experience for Lanyon as much as just a visual one. The controls needed constant attention, and there was limited time for gazing below. What mattered as much as looking was the feel of lifting and falling in air currents, changes of temperature between clear air and cloud, and changes of light caused by cloud shadow or the switch from the highly reflective ground substance of the sea to the almost non-reflective land."

Certain definitive formal changes in Lanyon’s work can be related to his pursuit of gliding. Around the time he began gliding, he started to paint on canvas rather than Masonite—the lighter, softer, more absorbent qualities of canvas apparently helped to facilitate his development of a gestural, atmospheric form of painting. Causey noted how, from 1962 onwards, Lanyon began to apply colour on the surface of the painting, whereas in earlier paintings—including Still Air—‘the strongest colours were previously applied first, and the whiter ones built round them, partially hiding them and cloaking them with a certain elusive mystery.’

The movement and quality of air were sources of fascination to Lanyon. He frequently used these things to suggest painterly invention. Describing his painting Thermal (1960, Tate), which like Still Air addresses this broad theme, he wrote: ‘The air is a very definite world of activity as complex and demanding as the sea […] The thermal itself is a current of hot air rising and eventually condensing into cloud. It is invisible and can only be apprehended by an instrument such as a glider […] The basic source of all soaring flight is the thermal—hot air rising from the ground as a large bubble.’ The titles of many other paintings from 1959–62 suggest similar inspiration: Rising Wind (1959, Gulbenkian Foundation); Downwind (1960); Airscape (1961); Backing Wind (1961, British Council); Calm Air (1961); Cliff Wind (1961); Headwind (1961); Rising Air (1961); and Inshore Wind (1962).

Writing in 1962, Lanyon compared his thrill from elevated aerial perspectives to the difficulties of communicating his chosen themes in paint:

"There is a species of failure which drives the artist to the inevitable and the only mark his desperation will permit. […] Because of this desperation I am led to explore the region of vertigo and of all possible edges where equilibrium is upset and I am made responsible by my own efforts for my own survival. Without this urgency of the cliff-face or of the air which I meet alone, I am impotent."

This statement suggests the thematic integrity of Lanyon’s work. He held himself to a high standard and aspired to make paintings that accurately convey his vivid personal sensations of gliding. Reference to ‘the region of vertigo and of all possible edges’ evokes the liminal zone between land and sea that he so frequently reconnoitred. His description of ‘desperation’ and ‘urgency’ implies that Lanyon conceived painting and gliding as linked parallel activities, similarly exciting and sensationally demanding.

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When exhibited in the memorial exhibition of Lanyon’s work organised by the Arts Council in 1968, Still Air was lent by the artist’s son Jonathan Lanyon. In Causey’s 1971 catalogue of Lanyon’s work, the painting was said to be owned by the artist’s wife Sheila Lanyon. The painting was illustrated upside down when it was sold at Sotheby’s in 1979.