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 testmament to a creative force spanning nearly 70 years.
Lydia was first introduced to Pablo Picasso at Vallauris on the French Riviera, sometime in the 1950s. Picasso was seperated with his wife Francois Gilot at this time. Lydia’s presence brought a new and positive phase to his artistry, and she became the model for a series of forty works.
Lydia, then called Sylvette David, would eventually change her name. Her connection to ‘Heads of Sylvette,’ Picasso's majorly innovative series of moulded metal sculptures, however, continues to this day.
Lydia moved to England in 1968, and began devoting herself to painting. She has been exhibiting 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 shown on BBC2 at the same time. In 2014, an exhibition of her watercolours were shown at Theater Bremen--concurrently with a major exhibition of Picasso’s work inspired by her, ‘Sylvette, Sylvette, Sylvette,’ held at the Kunsthalle Bremen. These two exhibitions were the subject of a film produced by ARTE, and broadcasted in England and Germany.
Lydia Corbett’s paintings and ceramics, it is said, 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. She 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, in 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. Using fluid lines, and abandoning scale and perspective, Lydia's paintings bring a new energy to every space.