{"id":896929,"date":"2026-09-15T18:18:31","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T18:18:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/896929\/"},"modified":"2026-09-15T18:18:31","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T18:18:31","slug":"she-went-to-her-studio-every-day-and-no-one-was-allowed-near-it-the-glorious-nature-paintings-of-yasmin-david-art-and-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/896929\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018She went to her studio every day and no one was allowed near it\u2019: the glorious nature paintings of Yasmin David | Art and design"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Clio David was growing up, her mother\u2019s studio was off-limits. The wooden outbuilding where her mother, Yasmin, went to paint was in the apple orchards that surrounded her childhood home in south Devon<\/a>. It had once been a dormitory for the students of Dartington Hall, a progressive school where Clio\u2019s father taught during the 1960s.<\/p>\n

Yasmin with her father, Laurie Lee, West Sussex, 1940. Photograph: Estate of Yasmin David<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was somewhere she went every day to paint and work, and no one was allowed near it,\u201d says Clio. \u201cThe walls of our house were covered in her paintings, but the studio was a private place.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yasmin\u2019s own family had celebrated and nurtured creativity. Her mother, Lorna, was one of the Garman siblings<\/a>, a free-spirited family whose friendships and love affairs connected everyone from Peggy Guggenheim<\/a> to Vita Sackville-West<\/a>. Lorna married Ernest Wishart, a wealthy communist who co-founded socialist publishing house Lawrence & Wishart<\/a>, but she was also Lucian Freud\u2019s lover and the subject of a number of his paintings before the painter met and married Lorna\u2019s niece, Kitty. When she was 19, Yasmin discovered that her biological father was writer Laurie Lee<\/a>. He dedicated his 1944 book of poetry, The Sun My Monument, to her mother and to \u201cY\u201d. Yasmin found out that her name was chosen because a capital letter Y resembles two conjoined Ls \u2013 to symbolise Laurie and Lorna\u2019s relationship.<\/p>\n

Untitled (Waterfall 2), by Yasmin David. Photograph: Courtesy of the Artist<\/p>\n

But Yasmin quit London and art school at 23, moving to rural Devon with her husband Julian David<\/a>, who became a Jungian analyst. She lived on Luscombe farm<\/a> for much of the rest of her life, and the full extent of her painting talent was only discovered after her death. Clio was going through her mother\u2019s possessions, and opened a cupboard to find more than 200 canvases and 550 works on paper neatly stacked inside \u2013 luminous, brooding pictures of the area\u2019s moorland, woods and rivers, with the wild landscape lit by spectral sunlight. There was also a wealth of poetry, nature writing and touching letters from Yasmin\u2019s father.<\/p>\n

A selection of these pieces were shown alongside the paintings in a memorial show at the New Art Gallery Walsall in 2021<\/a>. The gallery had been built by Lorna\u2019s sister, Kathleen Garman, to showcase work by her husband, sculptor Jacob Epstein.<\/p>\n

\"UntitledUntitled (Luscombe 1962), by Yasmin David. Photograph: Courtesy of the Artist<\/p>\n

This month, Yasmin\u2019s work is in a new solo show that focuses on her contribution to British landscape painting. The Nature of Light, featuring more than 40 works on canvas alongside drawings, sketches, notebooks and photographs, is at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery in Honiton<\/a>, about 40 miles from Yasmin\u2019s home in Luscombe.<\/p>\n

Curator Gemma Girvan says: \u201cPresenting Yasmin\u2019s works here brings them full circle, reconnecting them to the place which inspired them. Yasmin lived and worked on the edge of Dartmoor and many of the landscapes she painted will be instantly recognisable to our local audiences. We hope this exhibition will encourage wider debate about the many talented female artists whose work remains under-recognised including our gallery\u2019s namesake, Thelma Hulbert<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Art historian Sophie Hatchwell, who is giving a talk on Yasmin\u2019s work during the run of the show, says that it \u201csits in comparison with that of Joan Eardley<\/a>, Barbara Delaney<\/a> and Gillian Ayres<\/a>. It offers a way into thinking about the British landscape outside the traditional patriarchal framework as a territory to be conquered.\u201d<\/p>\n

The British art world, confronting its long history of institutional bias and sexism, is now reconsidering the importance of female art inspired by nature. The Courtauld gallery in London ran the exhibition A View of One\u2019s Own: Landscapes by British Women Artists<\/a> this spring, and artists as disparate as Cuban sculptor Ana Mendieta<\/a> and British printmaker Angie Lewin<\/a> have major shows either on or scheduled.<\/p>\n

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Portrait of Yasmin David in 1972. Photograph: Estate of Yasmin David<\/p>\n

Clio David, a documentary film-maker based in London, is now sharing her mother\u2019s work with academics at the Courtauld Institute to ensure Yasmin\u2019s contribution to the landscape genre is recognised. \u201cShe was one of the few women working in landscape during the latter part of the 20th century, and I want to place her archive within that period of art history.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yasmin\u2019s art is unique, but her background undeniably is, too. And raising the profile of her work would also change the picture of a family where typically women supported the men in their creative endeavours. Clio is all too aware of this: \u201cI want to show her work as her family history is largely dominated by male artists and writers \u2013 Laurie Lee<\/a>, Lucian Freud, Jacob Epstein, Roy Campbell, Michael Wishart. She was a female artist from a very well-connected family, but working outside the art establishment on a farm in the middle of the countryside, about as far from the Colony Rooms as you could get. I want her work as an artist to be recognised and celebrated.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Clio David was growing up, her mother\u2019s studio was off-limits. The wooden outbuilding where her mother, Yasmin,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":896930,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-896929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=896929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896929\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/896930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=896929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=896929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=896929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}