Laetitia Yhap
(1941 - ) |
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Portraiture Art Work
| Name: |
Laetitia Yhap |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
St Albans, United Kingdom |
| Nationality: |
British |
| Birth: |
1941 |
| Death: |
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| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
Portraiture |
| Medium: |
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| Method: |
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| Style: |
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| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painting
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Biography
Laetitia Yhap is known for her portraits (Helen Lessore and Sir William Coldstream both sat for her) and for paintings of fishermen at Hastings, Sussex. In the catalog for the exhibition Laetitia Yhap. The Business of the Beach 1976-88 (Laing Art Gallery. Newcastle upon Tyne and tour, 1988-9) she wrote about her training at Camberwell School of Art. Yhap found working in the life room difficult, because she was told: 'Women could not by their nature be objective and I began to be aware for the first time that I was female and in a minority/ A travel scholarship to Italy in 1962-3 has left a lasting influence, and on her return Yhap studied at the Slade
For the next decade Yhap experimented with subject matter, formats and media. She made a series of works in which there was no human presence, painted in watercolor and in a hybrid of her own invention, Liquitex and egg tempera. In about 1974 the human figure returned as her chief subject, when Yhap began to focus on the fishing community at Hastings. These new works were painted on the irregularly shaped supports that had resulted from her experiments. Some look like shields, or the wide screen of a cinema (perhaps invoking the great director Luchino Visconti's film about fishing. La Terra Trema 1946), or circles that look like roundels, suggesting both portholes and Yhap's knowledge of Renaissance art history. Yhap depicts the rituals that make up the fisherman's day, maintaining boats and nets and gutting fish, and she refers to the tough practicalities of the job in the frames she uses for some paintings, made of rope and weathered wood.
Yhap's attention to quotidian tasks does not mean that she overlooks the drama of her subject matter. In The Skeleton (1980-1) a man gingerly untangles a skeleton hauled in with the catch. The scene is made grimly humorous by the fact that he is wearing pink rubber gloves. Yhap has paid homage to the artists she admires, Degas, Gauguin, Manet, Goya and Poussin, by making transcriptions of their paintings peopled with her own cast- In 2000 Yhap's work was seen in the group show Order and Event - Landscape Now at the Art Space Gallery, London, alongside eleven other artists (all male) including Jeffery Camp and Euan Uglow.
Source: Alicia Foster, Tate Women Artists |
Samples of Work
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