At her base in the Languedoc, Raverat has continued to develop her take on the human figure, interpreted in various contexts. With an interest in surface and texture as her chief point of departure, she discovers her subjects within the many, transparent layers of paint she applies, identifying the images, as she says, where they are 'already hiding somewhere on the canvas'. In these heavily worked, fresco-like canvases, figures male or female, are glimpsed rather than directly confronted, sometimes in rooms - but often out of doors, in nearby gardens and vineyards or on the hills beyond. In the treatment of woodland and field contours as in her interiors with their characteristic tiled floors, pattern plays an important role, translating these graceful compositions of Raverat's on to another plane, beyond their ostensible subjects, where they seem to speak a more universal language.

On her visit to Cuba, Raverat found a haven among Havana's community of musicians. Herself an accomplished player of the chromatic accordion (with a penchant for klezmer), she felt she could connect instinctively with a culture in which music, vigorously encouraged and supported by the state, is the pulse of daily life. Against this aural background, she recalls, 'I found myself drawn like an actor into the drama that is the island's body language: the way people stand around, poised but with an edge that is unsettling, framed by doorways giving on to courtyards or squares, waiting, watching, being watched, silhouetted as if in some musical production against a flat, gold background somehow reminding me of certain compositions by Giotto and the pre-Renaissance painters of Italy.'

There is here an intriguing shift of tone. While in her paintings from France, Raverat's figures and 'presences' sometimes have a tentative quality, hovering as if uncertain they will the gain the viewer's attention, the inhabitants of her canvases from Cuba stand centre stage. Far from being about to slip out of sight, they adopt poses of nonchalant confidence, relaxed, sensuous yet dignified, preoccupied with others of their kind, inhabiting a very palpable present. The here-and-nowness of these figures needs no context or exposition, it simply adds another congenial dimension to Raverat's own freshness and lightness of spirit, to the pleasure she so clearly finds in observing and interpreting the rituals and habits of others' daily lives.

Biography

Born Cambridge 1948 into an academic and bohemian family. Lucy Raverat's father was a don at Trinity College, Cambridge, her mother Sophie, the daughter of Gwen Raverat, wood engraver and author of the classic Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood. Gwen, granddaughter of Charles Darwin, married the French painter Jacques Raverat, and Lucy's mother and her sister spent their early childhood in St. Paul de Vence. Amongst their circle were André Gide, Rupert Brooke, Samuel Spencer, Eric Gill and Leonard and Virginia Woolf, who stayed with them in France and with whom Jacques Raverat conducted an extended correspondence (Virginia Woolf and the Raverats, London 2004). This Bloomsbury connection, along with a deep sense of a family community engendered by the large Darwin clan, has sustained itself into Lucy's generation. 'Painting,' Lucy recalls, 'was what grown-ups did and an entirely normal way of passing one's time.'

In the 1960s Lucy Raverat studied briefly at Hornsey College of Art, then travelled to India, returning to live for some three years in an isolated cottage on the moors near Lancaster. Now married and with children already, she was able to make painting her main pursuit once more. With the encouragement of Richard Demarco in Edinburgh she participated in several exhibitions, before moving in the early 1990s to live in southern France. Represented by Francis Kyle Gallery since 2001, Lucy Raverat contributed in 2003 to the theme exhibition Roma, in 2005 to Lair of The Leopard: Twenty artists go in search of Lampedusa's Sicily and in 2006 to Everyone Sang: A view of Siegfried Sassoon and his World by twenty five painters today. One-person exhibitions with Francis Kyle Gallery 2003 and 2005.

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