Yasmin David Into the Light 3 July 2021 — Spring 2022 The New Art Gallery Walsall Exhibition guide Collections Galleries, Floors 1&2 The New Art Gallery is proud to present the first public solo exhibition by 20th century British landscape painter Yasmin David (1939-2009). INTRODUCTION Julie Brown, Collections Curator Yasmin David (1939-2009) produced a prolific body of work over 50 years. Well-connected, coming from the prodigious Garman clan, her mother Lorna was the youngest of nine remarkable siblings, whose influence spanned the artistic, social and political life of the early 20th century. Yasmin’s aunt Kathleen Garman, donor to The New Art Gallery, was the life partner of sculptor Jacob Epstein, and first mother-in-law of painter Lucian Freud. Yasmin’s brother was the celebrated 20th century painter, Michael Wishart (1928-1996), who studied under Cedric Morris at his East Anglian School of Painting, and moved in the same circles as Francis Bacon. Yasmin could have had the contacts to have exhibited widely, should she have chosen to. Lorna Wishart, Portrait of Yasmin with Rose, 1959 However the complexities of family dynamics may have led to Yasmin being reluctant to step into the limelight. She believed her brother, Michael, had been tormented by his genius (his dependency on drugs and alcohol were well documented). Lorna Wishart (1911-2000) was a vivacious character who captivated those around her with her Hollywood starlet demeanour. A young Lucian Freud was besotted with her, and she inspired early works such as Girl in an Ocelot Coat, 1944. Cover Image ~ Yasmin David, Untitled (Grey Dawn), c.2007, oil on board Aged 16, Lorna had married a University friend of her brother Douglas, publisher Ernest Wishart, and they had two sons by the time Lorna was 22. The couple remained devoted to each other throughout their lives. In 1937 Lorna was on a beach in Cornwall when she came across a young violinist and asked him to play for her. It was the poet, Laurie Lee (1914-1997). The two embarked on a passionate love affair, and in 1939 Lorna gave birth to Yasmin (so named as the ‘Y’ resembles two conjoined ‘Ls’.) Lee dedicated The Sun My Monument (1944), his first published book of war poetry to Lorna. Yasmin was brought up by Lorna and Ernest, and only discovered Laurie was her biological father when she was 19. Both Lucian Freud, Girl in an Ocelot Coat, 1944 Lucian and Laurie went on to marry Lorna’s nieces (Kitty and Kathy). Yasmin had a loyalty to the father with whom she had grown up, but was naturally inquisitive to learn more about Laurie. She cultivated a relationship with him, the two sharing a love of the English landscape and literature, and exchanging heartfelt, poetic correspondence throughout the rest of their lives. Yasmin chose to keep her art and poetry for herself, and shunned any kind of self- promotion. She chose to live her life freely, authentically and to its fullest (which could almost be the Garman family motto.) Having grown up in West Sussex, Yasmin studied art in Worthing for a year in 1957 and in the late 50s exhibited in group shows at The Mall Galleries in London. Then in 1961, aged 22, she married the educator, and later Jungian analyst, Julian David, and moved with him to rural South Devon. They both taught at Dartington Hall School (where Lucian Freud was once a pupil, alongside Epstein’s eldest daughter, Peggy Jean.) Apart from spells in Italy in the late 60s, where they ran a social work project with Dartington gap year students, and South Africa in the early 90s, at the end of the Apartheid, where her husband set up a Jungian training centre, they lived at Luscombe Farm together for the rest of her life, raising their three children, Esther, Gabriel and Clio. PAGE 3 From her wooden ‘bunkhouse’ studio amidst the apple orchards Yasmin explored her interest in psychoanalysis working as a counsellor, and spent time tending to the sheep, horse riding and helping with the foundation of Luscombe Drinks, a family business. Every day she would write in journals, describing the natural world on her doorstep, in poetic verse. Polaroid photographs, and sketches of the local landscape, were also the inspiration for her paintings, sometimes painted en plein air, but more often in her studio hideaway. Yasmin remained devoted to both her family, and also her painting, which became a personal endeavour with which to express her authentic self. Yasmin David, Untitled (Late Abstract 2), c.2008, oil on board Yasmin’s early work had a more traditional, realist approach, with subject matter including family portraits, domestic animals, wildlife and nature. As her own artistic language developed and matured, her works became more abstract in their approach to capturing the essence of the light and changing seasons of the countryside around her. Only close family and friends were aware of Yasmin’s intense devotion to her painting, and the full extent only revealed itself after she passed away, in 2009. Her daughter, the filmmaker Clio David, dedicated a decade to painstakingly uncovering her mother’s back catalogue, discovering many works carefully tucked away, hidden from view, across the family home and in outhouses on the farm. Yasmin David, c.1972. Drawer upon drawer was filled with sketches, notebooks, poetry, and photographs of favourite locations, mapping light, land and sky. Giving no titles to her works, or dates, Clio and the rest of her family plotted her biography through her work and the trajectory of her painting career has been approximated for this exhibition, with descriptions offered in place of titles. Comparisons have been made with text from her journals, Polaroids and notes of dramatic colour schemes, in determining the approximate date or location of works. Yasmin’s significant collection, was a mystery waiting to be discovered. During her lifetime it acted as a cathartic escape. However she become resolved the last few days of her life to entrust the work to her family, believing it was good enough to be exhibited when the time was right. Now, more than a decade later, the work is premiered alongside the collection of her aunt Kathleen, and the legacy of her mother and brother, ready to come into the spotlight, and cement her place in modern art history in her own right. PAGE 5 PAINTING WITH LIGHT Clio David A woodland stream, dark rock pools filled with quartz; a wet country lane, a tunnel of black and gold; a Dartmoor tor, blue in the distance with black clouds raining down either side. These are some of the images in my mother’s paintings. Yasmin David, Untitled (Woodland Stream 1), 1998-2003, oil on board A family friend once described her paintings as being like ‘Dark Turners’, and while Turner was a key influence, it was the light she painted with, the light illuminating the darkness. David Bowie was another influence. I believe in the light shining through, somehow. (David Bowie, Space Oddity). As was Credence Clearwater Revival, Simon and Garfunkel and much of the music of the 1970s. Her main influence was always the light and how it illuminated, shaped and sculpted the landscapes where she lived, predominantly in Devon, but also in Sicily and South Africa. Driving around in her car and looking at the passing landscapes was a great source of inspiration, and watching the light; on rainy days, seeing it diffuse on a black hill; on sunny days, watching it dance through leaves on to a dark stream; and how the clouds gathered and dispersed in the sky, casting shadows filled with drama on the landscapes below. She loved to watch the windy, watery, ever-changing light and seasons, which she painted mainly from her memory, and kept a notebook which she wrote in almost every day, composing poems from what she saw in nature. She was always looking, collating, preparing for her paintings. She took over 200 Polaroids of skies, rivers, hills, trees, all with the same particular light she recreated in her work. Together they created a kind of alchemy she practised every day in different forms, honing her vision as a painter, trying to get closer and closer to what it was that she was seeing. In his essay on painting in The Shape of a Pocket, John Berger wrote: The painter is constantly attempting to discover or stumble upon, the place which will contain and surround his present act of painting… How does a painting become a place? It’s no good looking for the place in nature. Nor can he search for it in art… when a place is found it is found somewhere on the frontier between nature and art. I think this is key to the understanding of my mother’s work – this meeting between art and nature – her paintings embody the constant preoccupation to discover this place. Her paintings also explore the polarity between light and dark, the sky and the land, the inner and outer states of being, often capturing the molten, ever changing quality of nature, creating powerful expressions of nature in a constant state of flux, of becoming. PAGE 7 Yasmin David, Untitled (Rain Over Dartmoor), c.2005, oil on canvas There is also a personal presence in her paintings – a human element. Her landscapes are dramatic, emotional and often turbulent – they represent a physical world, but also an inner world, and the drama of human feelings – of being. She never named her paintings, or signed them. I think, for her, painting was a process so much engrained in her everyday life that she didn’t objectify it, or her relation to the images she painted.