In our crazy, on-screen obsessive culture, it’s refreshing to stare at the culture that is still painting. We have Morandi and Vermeer, who are quiet masters of stillness, but the art done today tends to be wild colors and vigorous gestures. However, we do have portraits of British artist Celia Paul paintings, chairs, a bed, the sea, windows, windows outside, buildings outside, her windows and herself still quiet. These are still not life; they are the subjects filled with inner life, as if the subjects were not in this world or in this world. In addition to her works in recent years, her palette is soft and dark.
Paul has lived and painted in the same apartment for the past 43 years, painting the same chairs and beds on the same wooden painted, painted floor, the same windows, and painted jobs painted. She portrays what she knows: herself, her mother and sister, trees and buildings outside. Her human subjects don’t smile. It seems like they are not sad or angry, but reflect the artist’s mentality in painting. She was deeply focused on being introverted, as if she was digging for her soul. It is not easy to find this elusive essence. Yet, to some extent, in all her paintings, even in the chairs and beds, there is a brief, wandering nature.
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Mack Books has just published her monograph: Celia Paul: Works by 1975–2025. Its clocked at 544 pages and showed nearly 300 works, mainly paintings, as well as an article by Clare Carlisle, Hilton Als, Rowan Williams, Rowan Williams, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Paul and Edmund de Waal in a conversation with Katy Hessel, and an article by Paul Hellself. Few monographs published specifically for living artists, and including such unique and different papers is a huge honor for anyone. As ALS wrote in his article: “There are everywhere in the pictures, in all the waves of consciousness, to make yourself well known in paint. The wave, controlled by the hands of the artist, the sense of scale and narrative. A story, even in it, and even some of it, especially some of it, needs to shed tears.” He called the painting My sisters mourn Since 2015, a masterpiece.
The monograph begins with the work Paul did when he was 15 and moves in chronological order for sixty years, her latest work at the age of 65. We start with woodcuts, Sunflower head (1975) and time goes by until she recently on the oil on the canvas The sea, the sea (2024). Paul most often portrays her mother and her four sisters Kate. Her mother’s paintings are the gentlest and cutest. She looks small, often holding hands, her bare feet swollen, and sometimes sitting or lying down. There was also an inner thought on her face. Paul, in her book Self-portrait As her mother sat on the portrait since 2019, “she prayed with silent time: ‘She said it was a gift to Christians,’ she said.’” In Kate’s paintings, her sister often looked down at her. Her focus is also introverted, although not transcendent. She looks as fragile, exposed and tender as a mother. The paintings of Paul’s late husband Steve are the most caring.
In 2024, I talked to Paul about a lot of things. When I asked to draw for my mother, she told me that she missed her every day. “She died in 2015. She sat by my side twice a week from 1977 to 2007. In this sense, I pray, especially when I paint, my attention will make the painting have its own life.
In Paul’s seascape, the rhythmic movement of the waves is meditative. There is no storm, only the pulsating existence also makes people feel full of soul. “Since 2015, Paul’s sea views have been as much as her self-portraits and shares the quality of their intimacy, devoutness, search,” Clare Carlisle wrote in his monograph My Mother and the Sea. “About Paul’s soft ground etching, My mother and the sea (1999), she wrote: “Eloquently, because it is basic…existence…simplicity is beautiful.”
For Paul, the sea was a symbol of stillness and action. “Thinking
Paul wrote in his monograph: “The main danger of drawing self-portraits is of course the possibility of becoming a narcissist: to be obsessed with a person’s own physique and inner thoughts, so that the outside world and others have nothing to do with themselves, except to themselves.” She is carefully examining the image as she draws herself. From her 1983 self-portrait to the latest news in 2024, the review has become softer, gentler and more open. Experience, aging and understanding have been revealed. From 2021 to the last painting in the book, her palette is lightened with more blue, yellow and white. “I hope that the self-portraits I’ve created from now on convey another security. The self-portraits I’ve been satisfied with lately are credited to their success. ‘I’m a survivor.’ They are obviously saying. I’m confident, as if the paint is my armor.” However, these paintings feel lighter, easier, easier.
Proust is Paul’s favorite writer, “for beauty, humor, vulnerability, love, desire.” Proust often writes about time and memory, and you can see the same content in Paul’s paintings, how well they fit in innerity and censorship of the outside world. In her excellent translation of Lydia Davis’ introduction Swan’s wayshe wrote: “…according to a particular inner Vison, the importance of artists in changing their roles in reality: artists escape the tyranny of time through art.”
For a decade, Paul had a relationship with the painter Lucian Freud, who bought her the apartment where she lived and worked. He is, in turn, a friend of Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews. Paul drew four men in it Ghost’s colony (2023): “They represent my home because I belong to them, even if they can’t let me in.” She was 18 when she became lovers with Freud, until she was 28. Nearly forty years later, she wrote: “Now all four are dead; they live in a different way.”
exist Swan’s wayProustt wrote: “All these memories now form a mass, but people can still distinguish them – between the oldest, and those of the recent fragrances, and then those who only have those memories I have learned, and then I learn them from them, if not the real crack, if not the real flaw, at least not the era, that is a range, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain, that is certain
Last year, Paul told me that there wouldn’t be any photos in her monograph. “I’m often photographed. Photos are distracted from paintings. In the photos, I’m a model again, not an artist.”
Paul changed from heavy to light through the color of her paintings. She did come out from behind “painted armor,” she wrote, “and is easy to interact with my past, and I might try to paint compassionate self-portraits that convey a sense of peace with those who look at them.” In her 2023 portrait The painter sits in her studioshe wore perennial paint to play the job, but this time it was pale pink roses, backgrounds, slippers and skin. She seemed to be rooted in the natural grace of a woman, looking at a strong and soft face. It is her hands that give her soul–quiet, quiet peace. A profound job.
“Ghost’s colony“Until April 17, 2025, it was in Victoria Miro.”Celia Paul: Diary” Until May 2, 2025, located in Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert Gallery.
