When you talk to Isabel about her art, you get to see the world through her eyes, and it is intoxicating. She is a ray of light, at whose periphery infinite possibilities dance; she brings warmth and illumination to the lives of those who experience her work. Listening to her talk about her art is almost as transformative an experience as looking at her paintings; she creates whole worlds in her head, transfers them to the canvas, and invites the viewer to lose themselves in a piece of static art that feels as layered and dynamic as a short film.
During our conversations with Isabel, we were struck by her similarity to Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn. Like Eos, her art brings light, life, warmth, and connection. Like Eos, her work conveys intimacy and beauty and light and shadow.
Early Life
In early 2024, a few months removed from winning the Overall category at the 2023 Visual Art Open UK & International Awards (and being one of the youngest ever to win), Isabel is still trying to learn everything she can about everything related to Academic Realism in particular, and art in general. It’s been that way since 2002, when a tiny Isabel came into the world.
Isabel Couceiro da Costa Newman was born into a musical family: her grandmother taught sculpture in Portugal, her parents are scientists who love art and life, all the children sing, and her brother plays the piano really well.
So it was not very surprising that Isabel had art in her blood. One of her earliest memories is of sculpting tiny baby figures from clay; soon, she was setting her own skits to music, and writing and directing them. She fell in love with words, and created lovingly handcrafted pop-up 3D birthday cards as personalized gifts for those she loved.
In high school, Isabel decided to specialize in Musical Theater at Chicago Academy for the Arts. After three years, she graduated from high school, and was admitted to Boston Conservatory at Berklee, one of the most prestigious music schools in the world.
A New Road
As you might imagine, Isabel’s student dorm in Berklee was full of people making music all the time. Except for one person: Isabel painted non-stop; the torrent of artistic talent within her found expression on the canvas. Through a friend, she found out about Laguna College of Art and Design (LCAD), a premier visual arts school on the other side of the country. By the end of her first semester at Berklee, Isabel could no longer ignore the signs: she was meant to be at LCAD; she was meant to paint. With characteristic determination, she decided to make it happen.
During her second semester at Boston Conservatory, she worked day and night on creating a portfolio of fine art that she could use to apply to LCAD, while simultaneously living her life and attending classes. Somehow, everything worked out: she received an offer from LCAD, and won a good scholarship to attend her dream art school.
In many artist biographies, this would have been a good place to type out a variant of “and she lived happily ever after”.
Laguna College of Art and Design
LCAD stood as Isabel’s most significant triumph and her most formidable struggle.
She has always been very driven, and the fire to learn everything she possibly could about classical oil painting took her to Laguna Beach. When she got there, she loved it; she found a circle of artists at LCAD who shared the same passion, and they would sit and talk and draw and paint for hours; teaching, learning, and growing. Isabel thinks that the Renaissance Salons, many hundreds of years ago, must have been very similar.
It was in LCAD that she met Amber Jodoin, who would become one of her closest friends, and one of her most trusted art mentors. (Even today, half a world away, she texts Amber whenever she works on a new piece of art, which is another way of saying that they keep in touch every single day.) The LCAD community satisfied her thirst for knowledge, and she soaked up every single lesson like a sponge.
But it wasn’t easy. In her circle of artists, Isabel was a year or two younger than everyone else, and they had more formal training than she. They were giants in her eyes; they had exhibited their work, they were regulars at galleries. Isabel has always set very high standards for herself – unreasonably high standards, in this case. Anxiety and stress invaded her peace of mind. There was trouble in paradise.
And her personal life wasn’t easy, either. Isabel had grown up in Chicago; she thrives on connection and people and the constant swirl of new experiences and action. Laguna Beach is a small town; it closed down for the night by the time she was done with classes in the evening. A few months in, she was unhappy and depressed, and felt very unlike herself.
And so Isabel made one of the hardest decisions of her life, and decided to leave Laguna College of Art and Design for her well-being.
Boston University
In many ways, LCAD was the best option for Isabel: it is pretty much the only classical painting school in the US that awards college degrees. But she had to make a hard choice, and she decided to move on. She knew, by the fire within her, that she would be able to discover the resources she needed to become the artist she wanted to be, at LCAD or not. And so, after spending a semester in Community College in Chicago, she transferred to Boston University in fall 2023. She is now spending an exchange semester in Venice, expanding her repertoire of skills and gaining new inspiration.
Themes in Isabel’s Work
All of Isabel’s art is informed by her love for life, and fascination with the human body (she flirted with the idea of becoming a medical student before settling on a career in the arts). Her nurturing and caring family has been a huge influence on her, and she muses that she might even have dropped out of art school if it wasn’t for discussions with them that reinforced the usefulness of a college degree, especially if she wants to teach painting at some point.
Her desire for connection with other human beings manifests itself in her art: as a tiny child, she remembers sitting by the pool and prattling merrily to older people in deck chairs. Even today, her paintings feel like short films, like you’re part of a whole new world. And Isabel herself is part of two artistic worlds: her mother is from an old Portuguese family, and she has great love for the classical oil painting tradition. And her interest in addressing contemporary topics through her art comes from her American side – the best of both worlds!
I live in your eyes
I live in your eyes is a self-portrait, and started when Isabel asked her friend Amber a very simple question: How do people photograph themselves while painting a self portrait? Amber suggested that she use a mirror, and thereby introduced a subtle difference: the lateral inversion created a whole new person, in a sense. After this, Isabel thought a lot about mirrors, about identity, and about her other self, the one who only exists when observed in a mirror, like a quantum variable.
All of Isabel’s art projects start with a poem. Here is the poem that attended the birth of I live in your eyes:
I am cut from the same cloth as my reflection
except one only sees me deadpan
as my empty stares make my peripheral blurry
my saucer eyes dilate in my bathroom because I was too tired to turn on the lights
And I told myself I’d just feel my way around.
my second me knows I’m there, though she’s never felt my warmth or words
Just as I know just to the right are sharp tweezers on my floor
And just to the left is that hair I said I’d pick up
my remnants live with me but my mirror world can’t
I shadow myself around in windows
and water and sometimes even the eyes of others
when I lean in way too close
that double reflection can in fact feel my warmth and words
and my saucer eyes dilate in yours
Isabel’s self-portrait took shape over two weeks of intense work in January 2024. The idea developed and took shape during a trip to Portugal, where she had nothing to do except paint. She found the project a useful exercise in acquiring the technical skills she needed: during her oil painting journey, her brain has often worked faster than her hands, and she worked with mentors over FaceTime to learn the new skills she needed.
She built a gallery of reference images using photographs she took of herself in the mirror in her aunt’s house in Portugal, and spent many hours choosing the final reference from among scores of hi-res JPGs in a folder. After two weeks, the final painting was ready: an 8 in x 10 in tour de force that Isabel – and everyone else – loved.
Trippie Redd
In 2023, Isabel was commissioned to create the cover art for Trippie Redd’s Saint Michael V2 album. She was browsing open calls for artist projects in October 2023 when a vague posting caught her eye: Renaissance Painter required for Album Cover Art. Even though her art strays closer to the academic realism side, and not hyperrealism or Renaissance art, she had a hunch that her skill set was exactly what they were looking for, and she submitted her portfolio. The same day, the record label had reached out to her, and she soon began work on the cover art.
She is grateful for the experience: it was a steep learning curve, and it gave her invaluable insight into what the world of commercial art might look like. And she still managed to implement her painting style within the constraints of the external project.
Visual Art Open UK & International Emerging Artist Awards
In early 2023, Isabel created a painting called Sonder, a piece that typifies the sense of yearning that her work evokes. As you gaze at its delicate interplay of color and shadow, your imagination will fill the world of the train compartment with three dimensions of magic and a vivid backstory. It is also one of her largest pieces, standing nearly five feet tall, just a little shorter than Isabel herself.
In mid-2023, her huge spreadsheet of the biggest international art competitions told her that the Visual Artists Association was organizing the Visual Art Open competition in London, and she immediately thought of submitting Sonder, even though it hadn’t specifically been created for VAO. She didn’t initially think that she was going to win; after all, most submissions to art competitions are rejected, and a lot of the art exhibited in this one tended to be very modern and abstract. But she applied anyway (on the very last day before the application window – which had been open for months – closed); 50% student discounts are not to be sneezed at. She later found out that there had been several thousand submissions. There were five key categories, and she applied within the Young Artist category, where she competed with other 16-24 year olds creating various kinds of visual art.
The 6,000+ submissions were whittled down to the longlist, and Isabel’s Sonder made it through. And then there was the shortlist, and the list of 25 finalists, 5 in each category. Sonder was one of the final 25, and was to be exhibited in the Art Fair, after which five category winners (and an overall winner) were to be announced.
After looking up how much it would cost to ship the piece, and realizing that she’d love to visit London and talk about her painting to hundreds of art lovers, Isabel accompanied Sonder to the VAO Art Fair, with her mother. On the opening day, she had many pleasant surprises: her piece was front and center in the exhibition pamphlet, and the organizers were super happy that she’d been able to make it; not all the finalists had been able to. After a pleasant day of mixing with the guests and basking in the love they showed to Sonder, it was time for the results.
eBay sponsored a grand dinner attended by all the finalists. Even though it was one of the finest spreads she’d ever seen, Isabel couldn’t eat a morsel; nervousness had finally set in. Four category winner announcements came and went: Painting & Mixed Media, Illustration & Drawing, Sculpture, Photography & Digital Art. In the vacuum before the Young Artist winner was announced, Isabel understood that the YA winner was also the Overall Winner.
Isabel Couceiro da Costa Newman won both the Young Artist and the Overall categories at the Visual Art Open UK & International Emerging Artist Awards, 2023.
She was the youngest in the room, and had just achieved the biggest recognition of her career. She immediately went to find her mother, and burst into tears. Later, as she watched people take photos in front of Sonder, it all started to sink in.
Several months later, she is still very proud of her achievement, and has had time to reflect on how much she learned. Probably the biggest lesson was how to put her ideas into words, and summarize the infinite dimensions that her paintings occupy in a few pithy sentences. The experience made her even better at talking about her work, and connecting in person with those who love her art. And she is very grateful for her victory: in addition to the money, she has also been invited (by the Visual Artists Association) for a solo exhibition in 2024, and has a one year membership to the platform, through which she can access regular Zoom sessions about how to apply to galleries, for art residencies, and use social media to maximize her outreach.
This is her art school: the network of mentors and advisors she has built, her thirst for knowledge and learning, her love for life and warmth and connection.
Isabel would like to thank…
…her parents and friends for their endless support, the Visual Artists Association for their help, and Amber Jodoin for everything.
Links
Isabel’s website: https://www.isabelcouceiro.com/.
Isabel’s Art Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/isabelartchives/.