‘My work does reflect Picasso’s in many ways, although I have my own style, of course. I love all sorts of flowers and all sorts of colours. I create a picture where the tablecloth can become the landscape, I tell Bible stories. My family, friends, children, animals, birds, fishes, the sea and boats all inspire me. I do very quick, flowing drawings of figures, I am bold – as he was – especially in oil, where I use simple colours like black and grey, which are my favourite colours. These days I delve back to my youth, to the Sylvette time, which now feels like a fairytale. Picasso gave me a gift to tell this story, which I do now in paint.’
Lydia Corbett's work is highly distinctive, and immediately recognisable. She is very much an international painter, and her work can be found in private collections worldwide - a testament to a creative force spanning nearly 70 years.
Lydia Corbett is also known as the young girl with the blonde ponytail. Lydia, then called Sylvette David, was first introduced to Pablo Picasso at Vallauris on the French Riviera sometime in the 1950s. During this time, Picasso was separated from his wife, Francois Gilot. Lydia’s presence revitalised his artistry, and she became the model for a series of forty works. Today, her inextricable tie to ‘Heads of Sylvette,’ Picasso's innovative series of moulded metal sculptures, remains a major part of her life.
Lydia moved to England in 1968, where she soon devoted herself to painting. She's been exhibiting worldwide ever since, showing throughout Europe, Japan, the USA, and beyond. In 1993, the Tate Gallery staged a major exhibition of Picasso’s sculpture and paintings. A documentary film on Lydia and her friend and mentor was then shown on BBC2. In 2014, an exhibition of her watercolours were shown at Theater Bremen, alongside a major exhibition of Picasso’s work. This retrospective was titled ‘Sylvette, Sylvette, Sylvette,’ and was held at the Kunsthalle Bremen. These two exhibitions were later the subject of a film produced by ARTE, and broadcasted in England and Germany.
Lydia Corbett’s paintings and ceramics possess a dreamlike quality born of naivety. The term ‘naivety’ is used here not to demean, but rather to stress a form that shuns the intellectual. Corbett celebrates a childlike freedom of form, which casts off the yoke of our adult material existence. It allows the human form to bend impossibly like the stem of a flower, suggesting deep-rooted tangles of emotion.
Lydia’s paintings, both oil and watercolour, interweave human subjects with animals, vegetables, and minerals in blissful heavenly harmony. She is known for an ‘assured and gentle approach to the human figure’, as one critic put it. With fluid lines and an abandonment of scale and perspective, Lydia paintings bring a new energy to every space.