Beverley Isaacs

About

Beverley Isaacs is a British painter born and based in London. Her practice is rooted in the act of painting as a form of movement – an emotional and physical response to landscape. Her work unfolds through direct encounters with the natural world, particularly woodland, and exists in dialogue with experimental processes developed in the studio.
Through painting, she reflects on the fragile connections between ourselves and the natural world.

“My painting is a conversation between working from life and the imagination: an intertwining of past, present and future. Often, the process begins not in the studio but out in the woods, where I place myself in precarious situations – catching the last glimmer of light, or perched on a slope among brambles, accompanied by strange and mysterious sounds. These encounters introduce a kind of friction between body and environment, interior and exterior, that generates urgency in the mark-making.
I use fast-drying acrylics and gestural, intuitive movements to capture the energy of the present. Sometimes mud or dried leaves are gathered and pressed into the surface, as if wading through darkness. These found materials embed the physical trace of place into the canvas, becoming a kind of collaboration with the land – performative acts that carry over into the studio.

In the studio, these acts continue through more speculative and ethereal works. I often return to the same paintings, working in transparent layers that allow earlier marks to remain visible, like memory breaking through to the surface. Creatures and figures sometimes emerge through a process of automatism, forming a kind of living mythology from the tension between what is seen, sensed, and remembered.

Identifying as a Contemporary Romantic, I turn to nature as a way to reflect on the uncertain and unstable times we live in.  Just as the Romantics once responded to the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, I find painting to be a slow, tactile way to question certainty in a digital age shaped by AI. It is through this act that I explore presence, fragility, and the essence of being.”

Recipient of the Paul Desty Scholarship.