Isabella Timothy
Isabella Timothy is a London-based visual artist whose monumental charcoal portraits are as bold in scale as they are in purpose. Through a powerful monochrome palette and expressive mark-making, her work explores identity, community, and cultural heritage with an unflinching commitment to visibility, storytelling, and celebration.
Working predominantly with charcoal, Timothy creates large-scale portraits that feel both intimate and epic. Her approach to portraiture is rooted in empathy and connection; every smudge, shadow, and line serves as an extension of the subject’s presence, history, and humanity. Whether working with people she knows personally or those who share similar cultural narratives, Timothy’s drawings honour the depth and dignity of lives that are too often overlooked or flattened in mainstream art and media.
Her work doesn’t just depict faces it captures legacies, emotion, and identity. Each piece becomes a visual archive, a quiet act of resistance, and a loud call for representation.
Deeply inspired by her own heritage and lived experiences, Isabella often draws from the richness of diasporic traditions, familial storytelling, and intergenerational memory. Her portraits are a celebration of Blackness, community bonds, and cultural resilience. Through her work, she explores what it means to be seen really seen—in a world that often renders difference invisible.
Timothy’s mastery of charcoal allows her to play with texture, contrast, and scale in ways that feel alive. The softness of smudged contours sits alongside bold, unflinching gazes; the fragility of the medium balanced by the strength of the subject matter. Her process is deeply physical and meditative, often taking weeks or months to complete a single work. The result is art that feels alive—charged with presence and energy.
Beyond the studio, Isabella is a firm believer in art as a communal experience. She regularly hosts workshops and creative spaces designed to engage young people and emerging artists from underrepresented backgrounds, helping them find and hone their voice through visual expression. For her, creativity is a tool for empowerment a way to amplify unheard voices and spark intergenerational dialogue.
Her work has been exhibited across the UK and featured in publications spotlighting rising talent in contemporary figurative art. With each exhibition, she continues to expand the conversation around who gets to be centred, celebrated, and remembered in the canon of portraiture.
Isabella Timothy isn’t just drawing people she’s drawing attention to the power of art to represent, uplift, and reclaim.
Her portraits are portals into deeper truths: about belonging, about legacy, and about the urgent need for a more inclusive visual culture.
Because when charcoal meets truth, it leaves a mark and Timothy is making hers, one powerful portrait at a time.
Creative Debuts have commissioned and showcased Isabella many times. Including an exhibition with adidas and a commission here with Brookfield.
