Press/Essays

Essays

Oil Paintings

My inspiration comes from everywhere. Certain animals like the horse, the dove, the robin make me draw as does the sea, fish, the moorlands of my home in Devon and my home of Provence. I paint forever and like the Japanese artist Hokusai: ‘Nothing I did before was worth looking at. When I reach 80 I’ll be making progress so that in my 90’s I’ll have penetrated even further the hidden meaning of things; by the age of 100, even dots and lines will surely possess a life of their own’.

‘In Corbett’s oil paintings different process are engaged. Charcoal outlines are sketched in, then light and shade, and colour becomes form. The surface texture of any overpainting becomes impasted and overlaid by a sequence of reworkings. There is an oscillation between light and form, and form and memory. The freedom to alter, to erase and paint over and to experiment is the raison d’etre for the painting’s existence. Corbett is an artist who creates because she has to create.’

Lucien Berman 2018 (edited)

Watercolour Paintings

‘What is striking is the wide range of Lydia Corbett’s works and their emotional and expressive depth. Corbett in her visions as a spiritual artist is best seen in her watercolours with their delicacy, translucency, and that pared down balance between form and chaos, from the English tradition of David Jones, Cecil Collins and Samuel Palmer. They have a beguiling presence. Her landscapes are soulful and timeless, yet concerned with a sensibility of place, a focus on emotion. The domestic interiors captured in her fugitive colours refer to daily habit and deception. Her watercolours at their best are always an offering to seemingly incompatible voices, or points of view. What appears effortless is not without emotional suffering or pain.’

Lucien Berman 2018 (edited)

Ceramics

‘Lydia Corbett’s ceramics are an integral and necessary part of her oeuvre as an artist, and her work sometimes recalls elements from antiquity, such as the paintings of the early Roman or Etruscan pottery, or Cretan beaked jugs, and yet also might recall Ken Kiff and the unselfconsciousness of Karel Appel or Asger Jorn; or I see elements of expressionism in her work, but always they are recognisably her own. Playfulness is always allowed, which does not detract from their seriousness. Corbett’s work in ceramics are both works of sculpture and painting. The pottery pieces are exercises in truth. They have presence.’

Lucien Berman 2018 (edited)