The chef, the singer, the lawyer and the fashion designer who became artists

A former chef, a singer-songwriter, a political consultant, a cosmetics marketing executive and Jewish fashion doyennes Lucille Lewin and Nicole Farhi, who have evolved into full-time visual artists, are among ten artists who have returned to their studios to find fresh success and recognition after not showing for several years and their work is being shown in London.

Even the curators of Second Lives, which opens today, reinvented themselves to pursue their passion for art. Paula Lent, formerly a lawyer at Mishcon de Reya, explains that after leaving the legal profession after 15 years she dedicated her time to having children late in life and completing a master’s in art history. “Then I was offered the chance to curate an exhibition for an international artist who wanted to establish herself in the UK; with no experience I took the job.”

Like the artists she champions, who drew on skills from previous lives, Lent transferred those she had acquired herself, namely “meticulous planning, a strong work ethic and attention to detail” in conducting litigation to the art world: “

Hanging the new show in Fitzrovia with co-curator Jane Neal, Lent confesses to a fascination with parallel lives since meeting the late great Frank Auerbach and learning of his own early interest in becoming a lawyer before evolving into one of Britain’s greatest painters: “He also challenged the negative connotations attached to artists who had departed from their calling.”

That comment fostered her curiosity about established artists with gaps in their exhibition CVs, including the other two Jewish artists showing – multi-prizewinning painter Davina Jackson and internationally-exhibited sculptor and installation artist Jyll Bradley.

Motherhood prompted Jackson’s first pause after a glittering start, winning the Gold Medal in painting from the Royal Academy, where she finished her training. “My art had to take a back seat when my first son was born,” says the London-based artist, who gave birth to three children within five years. “Apart from the fact of having no energy left, something my mum said stayed with me: ‘You’re always going to have your art, but your children are going to be growing up and you’re never going to have that time back again.’”

She welcomed that break but not so much a second enforced pause in 2019, when a shock breast cancer diagnosis was followed by Covid preventing her from travelling from her Finchley home to her studio in West Hampstead. But that very limitation led to reinvention via a new medium. “I did loads of watercolours at home and entered them into The Sunday Times watercolour competition.  I made it into the finals and the exhibition, and made loads of new contacts – it was a blessing.”

Elected to the Royal Watercolour Society in 2023 after winning its Open award, this year she was highly commended in the competition for the John Moores Prize, reaching the shortlist of five for what is considered the most prestigious painting award in the UK.

Jyll Bradley takes inspiration from the kabbalistic concept of ratzo v’shov, which translates as running and returning. “What’s brilliant about Judaism is that it’s almost a commandment to question your practice, recreate, evolve and begin again”, says the artist famous for creating work in fluorescent Plexiglas, with mezuzahs a recurring motif. “In fact I see Grafts, the self-portraits I’ve created in Plexiglas my own height, as giant mezuzot,” she says. Although she did not show her visual art for the 10 years she concentrated on writing for radio, she says it is her artworks of herself having a second life in this show. “By coming back to self-portraits I took 40 years ago when I didn’t really understand them, and showing them now encased in Plexiglas, I am framing my past in my present.”

Lucille Lewin, founder of the fashion chain Whistles and creative director of Liberty, is living proof that it’s never too late to consider a new career – she was 69 when she won the Royal College of Art’s Young Masters award, having had her life changed by a pottery class. It saw her transition from the simplicity of tailored fashion to the messy micro-worlds of fragmented porcelain, through which she expresses her feelings about unsettled times when nature struggles to survive as the ecology declines and chaos rules.

International men’s and womenswear designer Nicole Farhi, with whom Lewin has exhibited several times, was also in her 60s before finding the freedom to walk away from her last collection and concentrate full-time on the sculpture she studied at evening class before being mentored by Sir Eduardo Paolozzi. Now a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors, recipient of a CBE and the Legion d’Honneur from her native France, where her work is celebrated in a museum dedicated to women artists, she does not deny the importance of her switch to fashion, which she studied alongside art in Paris, saying it has brought “everything” to her studio practice.

Neal, who has been described as one of the most knowledgeable of all independent curators, strove for her own reinvention after her art education was interrupted not by a switch into fashion, but by teenage pregnancy. She was a 23-year-old mother of two when she realised she was in “the wrong picture. I was born to be a creative. I drew constantly but knew I needed to study.”

Within six years of funding courses with cleaning work and studying into the night after putting her children to bed, she graduated from the Ruskin School of Art and the Courtauld Institute and launched the creative career she had put on hold. And this second life was informed by her first, she emphasises: “I realise how much experience and invaluable perspective I gained by being a working mother”. She hopes showing the work of others who have succeeded in living their creative dream will inspire visitors to the exhibition who may have suppressed their own up to now: “If you find yourself living in the ‘wrong picture’, change it.”

Second Lives is at 14 Percy Street, London W1 until 24 November. Nicole Farhi and Lucille Lewin will participate in a Q&A on 21 November 21 at 6pm. secondlivesart.com