
Ella Jerman-Riddell
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Provenance
With The Phoenix Gallery, Lavenham
This is one of six oil sketches made in Greece alongside the early Icarus works.
Exploring Greece in the late 1950s, Ayrton became just as entranced by the landscape itself as by its past and legends. He wrote of it as "silver and honey and all changing under the light, you must contain it as an idea before you can paint it ... It is a sculptured land, a land of bone and muscle and the sea sinews run through and along every part of it ... splendour and delight and the slow contemplating mountains bedded in tumbled rocks".
The 'Shore' works map the progress of his self-immersion in the land, the "stony, shining haunting of the spirit which came out of the ground". The paint is both more varied in texture and more freely handled than in the landscapes of Ayrton's Neo-Romantic years, while the complicated composition, dominated by semi-abstract, tightly interlocking contours, foreshadows the obsession with mazes which would drive much of his later work.
Ayrton's landscapes rarely document specific views, but the inspiration of this painting is the island of Delos, looking out from the ruins towards Rinia.
We are grateful to Justine Hopkins for compiling this catalogue entry.