Pat Devereaux speaks to Isa L Levy about her career in the arts, spanning one-woman shows to eclectic paintings

There is something charming and delightfully surprising about Isa L Levy, whose non-conformism seems to run through her work and her very being. Like her paintings, her colourful presence jumps out of the canvas to meet you.

Born in 1948 in Cardiff, Isa grew up in a tight-knit Jewish community. Her parents were very involved in the Cardiff Reform Synagogue. Her mother ran retail shops and her father went from teaching to lecturing at the university. At school, Isa enjoyed ballet, drama and art and won music and drama prizes. “I vividly remember the poet Dylan Thomas visiting our family in Wales and I sat on his knee,” said Isa. “He was a friend of my uncle, Mervyn Levy, an art critic and writer. Dylan and my uncle shared a Chelsea home for a while. I feel I identified with my uncle who was seen as the black sheep of the family.”

As a teenager in the swinging 60s, Isa heard The Beatles play live in Cardiff. Bob Dylan, Carol King, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen also all influenced her own music. In her late teens, she began to question her sexuality: “A great deal of confusion played out in my inner world at this time, which I was wrestling with: what my parents’ expectations were, and who I actually was.”

Isa said her life experiences have taught her that “as we identify with a negative inner world our soul dies, but not quite. With my creativity, I learnt to dance in the light rather than cower in the shadows too scared to speak.”

Later, Isa began to write her own one-woman shows. One was called Take Off with Mrs Frumburger, a comedy act which she performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Another performance was held at Wormwood Scrubs Prison, to those sentenced to life inside, and it culminated in a near riot.

Now a Haringey-based arts psychotherapist, Isa expressed in her recently published memoir Conversations With a Blank Canvas that she identifies as a Jew ancestrally, culturally and creatively through her Eastern European roots. One of her most extraordinary paintings featured in the book is titled Memory To My Roots: After Kitaj. Another of her outstanding paintings is called The Rabbi’s Daughter. It is a thought-provoking portrait of Shoshi Rayner, commissioned by the late Rabbi Rayner of St John’s Wood Liberal Jewish Synagogue.

Her memoir follows a chronology of eight decades, revealing her growth and evolution. The dominant metaphor is that of
engaging with a blank canvas before one begins to paint, dealing with themes such as the recovery from ‘black and white’
feelings of depression and loneliness to reaching a more meaningful, colourful life through psychotherapy, creative expression and spiritual rejuvenation.

Over the decades, Isa shows how she journeyed from a false self to a more authentic version. “Through my art, therapy and writing, I learnt that the life-force spirit can be rejuvenated and it can bring us freedom from the past,” Isa insisted. The memoir reveals Isa’s own psychological, artistic and spiritual processes through images, poetry and words, as she sheds and reforms new evolutions to reach a state of belonging.

As well as photographs relating to her life and relationships, Isa has included colour plates of her vivid paintings in the book. She is an accomplished artist, who completed a masters in arts and psychotherapy at the Institute for Arts in Therapy and Education (IATE) in her early 60s. Her own artist’s studio is based at Collage Arts. Over the years, she has produced some 450 paintings there. In her seventh decade, Isa began a new career as an arts psychotherapist. In her eighth decade, she returned to the stage in a musical production based on Susie Orbach’s book Fat is a Feminist Issue. Who can say what the next decades will bring.

The launch of ‘Conversations with a Blank Canvas’ will be held at Karamel Restaurant, 4 Coburg Road N22 6UJ on 15th April 2023.

No news is bad news

Independent news outlets like ours – reporting for the community without rich backers – are under threat of closure, turning British towns into news deserts.

The audiences they serve know less, understand less, and can do less.

If our coverage has helped you understand our community a little bit better, please consider supporting us with a monthly, or one-off donation.