Henry's career as a painter started promisingly while still in London, with two shows of monumental paintings, "Discovering New Worlds", at the Woolwich Y.M.C.A. (where he was working as a lifeguard) and the Queenswood Gallery, enthusiastically and as it turns out, prophetically, reviewed by Cottie Burland in the Arts Review 1961. He notes that "[Israel's] colours and the emotional quality of his work belong to his age without any concealment or attempt to copy the fashions...this interesting painter will develop new, and richer, depth of quality...". He notes that the paintings were "concerned with the interrelations of figures and landscape" - a theme that was to remain central not only to Henry's painting, but his life and thinking about the human condition.

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He and his new wife, painter Caeria Strong, had just moved to Cornwall (the New World alluded to) that same year, where they were to embark on a life of living close to the land, raising a family and continuing to paint and exhibit.

 

Over the next six decades, as outlined in the following pages, Henry experimented continually with paint, support, abstraction and figuration in the effort to achieve that "rightness" he had sought as a child.

 

He came to think of painting as visual poetry, that is a distillation of a visual experience, a moment of light and form that hits the painter’s sense of rightness and asks to be recorded. He was not concerned with an accurate description of the objects hit by the light rather in conveying through paint the beauty of that moment. His paintings reveal a fascination with the description of edges, light and shade.

 

The following pages present a selection of paintings from each decade, roughly tracking the evolution of his approaches. The quality of the images may vary depending on the source - Henry was no great cataloguer of his work, and details are scarce.