In 1939 the family moved to Sydney, Australia, where his father joined the Royal Australian Air Force for the duration of World War II.
[6][7] During this time, two nights a week he attended North Sydney Technical College evening art classes taught by Peter Laverty.
[4] In 1961, together with fellow East Sydney graduates Mike Brown and Ross Crothall, Lanceley formed the Annandale Imitation Realists, producing collaborative collages incorporating found objects.
[11] In 1964 Lanceley won the Helena Rubinstein Travelling Scholarship[12] and the following year, together with his future wife Kay Morphett and her two children, he sailed for Europe to see its great works of art.
In developing his style of three-dimensional paintings, Lanceley absorbed the influence of the Modernists in art, and drew inspiration also from the poetry of T. S. Eliot and the music of Béla Bartók and Igor Stravinsky.
[16] Notable works of this early London period, described by Robert Hughes as "transitional",[17] included Icarus II (1966), The Miraculous Mandarin (1966) and Atlas (1967).
Back in Australia Lanceley brought his European experience to bear on his depictions of landscape and the unseen human presence within it.
[23] In 1987 he was given a solo survey exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and in the same year a book on his work was published with an introduction by Robert Hughes.
[26] Lanceley had returned with the idea of what a great art school could be, a place where students in all disciplines were taught by experienced practising artists.
[35] Artists who became his friends back in Australia included Lloyd Rees, Jan Senbergs and Lawrence Daws, whose Glass House Mountains home in Queensland became a holiday destination for the family.
[38] In his final illness, Lanceley gave interviews to Elizabeth Fortescue[39] in which he spoke about his love of "the layering of human culture".