Caeria's career as a painter began promisingly, twice gaining scholarships to study in France while at Wimbledon School of Art and later at Saint Martin's. Upon graduating from the Royal College she exhibited in the 1961 Young Contemporaries Show at the RBA Gallery, where British Pop art was born. Caeria was not one of this group - the roots of her concerns ran much deeper. The title of her thesis for the RCA was "How Man's Instinct for the Workings of Nature Finds Expression in His Creations", not exactly the direction that current art trends were moving.

She would go on, however, to address that same line of enquiry, not only through painting, but through the very living of the life that she and her painter husband Henry Israel chose to live.

It was perhaps the traumas she had experienced as child - the loss of her beloved father to cancer when she was 11 and her unstable mother's suicide in 1951 - that led her to search so deeply for meaning, and were the cause of the undiagnosed depression that dogged her.

She found a kindred spirit in Henry, also studying painting and with the same searching outlook. They lost no time in moving in together in Blackheath, and then to Cornwall. There they would become very deeply involved in those 'workings of nature' through running a smallholding and market garden, bringing up four children while still finding time to draw and paint. 

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