Lydia Corbett – Picasso’s “Girl with a Ponytail”
During the summer of 1954 there was a chance encounter between Lydia (then known as Sylvette David) and the emerging genius Pablo Picasso.
Picasso had spotted Lydia amongst a group of young people living in and around the French pottery town of Vallauris. He painted her from a distance and eventually approached her with his painting. Within weeks, she became his model. She was 19 and he was 73.
During the summer of 1954, Sylvette posed for the artist and became the inspiration for around 40 of his paintings during this period.
"I was a very shy girl at the time," she explained, "but I was the Girl with the Ponytail. He was experimenting with light and shade with my portraits. They were very solid like sculptures. Very dark lines - sketchy in a way."
At the end of the summer, Lydia moved to Paris and was never to see Picasso again.
Statement
“My paintings and ceramics, it is said, possess a dreamlike quality born of naivety. The term naivety used to describe her stylistic sense in not to demean, but rather to stress a form that shuns the intellectual.
“I like to celebrate 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.
“Abandoning scale and perspective, my paintings interweave human subjects with animals, vegetables, minerals and even Provencal tablecloths, in blissful earthly harmony.
"The paintings begin with a pen and ink drawing. The subject nearly always starts with a tablecloth which, for me, is the landscape. My pen of Indian ink runs away like a river as I fill the page with flowers. These flowers are in one of my many vases that I collect or have made myself. I add watercolour in bright splashes and use the pen again, the ink mingling with the watercolour as I include my other subjects. These will usually be my family, my home in Devon, or in Provence, or any place or experience that inspires me. Finally my story in paint is complete.
“I have also added oils to my repertoire, enjoying the challenge of this very different medium. Driftwood has also become a vehicle: beautiful sea-shaped wood will suggest a figure or an animal, a boat, a fish, an angel. These are decorated in egg tempera and joined together to create a different story in paint.
“Another passion for me is pottery. I enjoy making ladies/lamps, pots, cats, and tiles. Always experimenting, I play with glazes and painting ready-made pots and plates.”