It started in June, when a local fixer asked if Isobel would like to be artist-in-residence under the Westway for four weeks, as part of the Notting Hill Visual Arts Festival. It’s become an addiction and Isobel is out drogging (drawing and blogging) at least once a week, under the canopy next to Portobello Green where the A40 flies over Portobello Road.

Isobel enjoy life drawing and she had imagined that she would be sketching half-dressed sun-worshippers in high summer, but Isobel instantly found out that it was going to be about parkas, damp dogs, and feeling like a storm-lashed extra from Moby Dick.

Instead of drawing bodies, Isobel make rapid portraits of anyone who flops down into the sitter’s chair opposite her. "You talk about your life (she doesn’t ask her subjects to keep still – they’d get bored), I take a likeness, give it a squirt of fixative, and it’s yours."

Between artist and sitter there is a mysterious moment of contact, intimacy and exchange. Many of her sitters – who include Rastas, tourists, local residents, children, the homeless and asylum seekers – have never been observed in this way before. Despite the drawbacks when sheets of paper go flying in the wind and the rain blows in sideways under the canopy, Isobel has found an easy acceptance out here in the particle-laden air and the white noise from the flyover. Among her sitters, there is a loyal cast of regulars, as in any soap opera. And she still has much to learn about an area she thought she already knew.

For information about when and where Isobel is drawing, please see izzybody.blogspot.com

Isobel's website for life drawings is isobelwilliams.org.uk