Painter, born in Cambridge, who studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, 1962–6. There his “determination to work figuratively represented something of a protest against the prevailing fashion for abstract and later conceptual art.” For many years he “struggled to find a middle way between the abstract and the figurative in which the figure and his environment were of equal importance and in which neither specified time or place. Gradually time and place and the specificity of the figure were to assume greater and greater importance.” Later, turning to still life primarily as an exercise, Yorke found that “here was another aspect of portraiture.” Yorke sought “to recreate and convey, in my portraits and in my still lifes, the mystery and power of ‘presence’.