"I am interested in who we are, and where our roots are, and what makes us what we are. As I’m Jewish, I’ve gone into my own Jewish identity,” says artist Beverley-Jane Stewart. But that hardly does justice to the deep thought and work and bustling detail that enliven her canvases.

Bournemouth high res

Stewart's tribute to Bournemouth

Farewell to Blackpool

Farewell to Blackpool

She grew up in Clapham, south London, attending Brixton Synagogue. This gave her a sense of the synagogue as a space for Jewishness amid a non-Jewish world, and was also somewhere where she encountered all kinds of Jews from many different background. Her interest in society and social history was further developed working as an art teacher in primary schools in Brixton and Camberwell. “My aim was to make every child proud of who they were and where they had come from and that continues in my art.”
She’s happy to be back in shul after lockdown (she’s a member of St John’s Wood United). “I live a lot in isolation with my work as an artist, you can be totally wrapped up. And that to me is not healthy. And when you go to shul I meet a whole different crowd of people. And that’s good. You need to keep your social skills going. And you need to know there’s another world other than what you’re interested in.”

Peddling to Prayer - Plymouth

Stewart’s painting of Plymouth draws on the town’s history to show the contrast between the private, sacred world of Orthodox Jewish traders visiting ships where sailors are gambling and drinking

Her latest work was sparked by an interest in exploring her family’s roots in Romania and expanded to take in explorations of former synagogues in Eastern Europe, using different media and techniques to convey the horror of the Nazi years. “Though many Jews were murdered, Judaism did not die,” she says. “Amongst the debris of the abandoned synagogues, the spirit survived.”
An exhibition of her work opened this week at the National Holocaust Centre. holocaust.org.uk 