{"id":2845,"date":"2025-03-31T17:13:16","date_gmt":"2025-03-31T17:13:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/03\/31\/a-consideration-of-time-celia-pauls-monograph-and-memory\/"},"modified":"2025-03-31T17:13:18","modified_gmt":"2025-03-31T17:13:18","slug":"a-consideration-of-time-celia-pauls-monograph-and-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/03\/31\/a-consideration-of-time-celia-pauls-monograph-and-memory\/","title":{"rendered":"A Consideration of Time: Celia Paul\u2019s Monograph and Memory"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Celia Paul, My Sisters in Mourning<\/em>, 2015; from Celia Paul: Works 1975\u20132025<\/em> (MACK, 2025). Courtesy of Victoria Miro<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In our frantic, screen-obsessed culture, it is refreshing to gaze at paintings that are still. We have Morandi and Vermeer, masters of quiet stillness, but the art made today tends towards a flotilla of wild color and exuberant gesture. Yet, we do have the British artist Celia Paul<\/a>, who paints portraits, a chair, one bed, the sea, a window, the tree out her window, a building out the same window and herself, still and quiet. These are not still lifes; they are subjects imbued with an inner life as if the subjects were not quite in this world or of this world. Except for works in more recent years, her palette has been subdued and dark.<\/p>\n

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Paul has been living and painting in the same flat for the last 43 years, painting the same chair and bed, the same window, painting in paint-coated smocks, on the same wooden, paint-flecked floorboards. She paints what she knows: herself, her mother and sisters, the tree and buildings out her window. None of her human subjects are smiling. It is not as if they are sad or angry, but rather a reflection of the artist\u2019s state of mind in the act of painting them. She is deeply focused, delving inward as if mining the soul. This cannot be easy, finding such an elusive essence; yet somehow, in all her paintings, even the chair and the bed, there is this ephemeral, hovering essence.<\/p>\n

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SEE ALSO: At the High, Ryoji Ikeda\u2019s \u201cData-Verse\u201d Is an Ego Killer <\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Mack Books has just published her monograph: Celia Paul: Works 1975\u20132025<\/i>. It clocks in at 544 pages, displaying nearly 300 works, mostly paintings, with essays by Clare Carlisle<\/a>, Hilton Als<\/a>, Rowan Williams<\/a>, Karl Ove Knausgaard<\/a>, Paul and Edmund de Waal<\/a> in conversation with Katy Hessel<\/a>, along with an essay by Paul herself. It is rare to have a monograph published for a living artist and to include such uniquely dissimilar essays would be an immense honor for anyone. As Als writes in his essay, \u201cShe is everywhere in the pictures, in all those waves of consciousness that let themselves be known in paint. Wave after wave, controlled by the artist\u2019s hand, and the sense of scale and narrative. A story that needs telling, even as some of it, or especially some of it, drips down like tears.\u201d He calls the painting My Sisters in Mourning<\/i> from 2015 a masterpiece.<\/p>\n

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Celia Paul, My Chair<\/em>, 2020; from Celia Paul: Works 1975\u20132025<\/em> (MACK, 2025). Courtesy of Victoria Miro<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The monograph begins with work Paul made when she was fifteen and moves chronologically through six decades to her most recent work at her current age of 65. We start with a woodcut, Sunflower Heads<\/i> (1975) and travel through time until her most recent oil on canvas, The Sea, the Sea<\/i> (2024). Over five decades, Paul most often painted her mother and one of her four sisters, Kate. The paintings of her mother are some of the most tender and endearing. She appears small, often with clasped hands, her swollen feet bare, sometimes sitting or lying down. She, too, has an inward, contemplative look on her face. Paul, in her book Self-Portrait<\/i> from 2019, wrote that when her mother sat for portraits, \u201cShe used the time of silence for prayer: \u2018What a gift for a Christian,\u2019 she said.\u201d In the paintings of Kate, her sister is most often looking down and to her right. Her focus, too, is inward, though not aloof. She appears vulnerable, exposed and also tender, like her mother. The paintings of Paul\u2019s late husband, Steve, are among the most loving.<\/p>\n

In 2024, I talked with Paul about many things<\/a>. When I asked about painting her mother, she told me that she misses her every day. \u201cShe died in 2015. For thirty years, from 1977 to 2007, she sat for me twice a week. The act of sitting was an act of devotion. She wasn\u2019t interested in the outcome, she was \u2018there\u2019 for me. I think prayer is the equivalent of this form of attention, of being present, being \u2018there.\u2019 In this sense, I pray, especially when I paint because my attention is what will give the painting a chance of having a life of its own. Every artist wants to create a work of art that has a life of its own, separate from its maker.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Celia Paul, Room, Great Russell Street, Morning<\/em>, 2020; from Celia Paul: Works 1975\u20132025<\/em> (MACK, 2025). Courtesy of Victoria Miro<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In Paul\u2019s seascapes, the rhythmic movement of the waves is meditative. There are no storms, only a pulsing presence that also feels soulful. Clare Carlisle, in her essay in the monograph, \u201cMy Mother and the Sea,\u201d writes: \u201cFrom 2015, Paul\u2019s seascapes are as numerous as her self-portraits, and share their intimate, devotional, searching quality.\u201d About Paul\u2019s soft ground etching, My Mother and the Sea<\/i> (1999), she wrote: \u201cEloquent as it is elemental\u2026 existential\u2026 beautiful in its simplicity.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Paul, the sea is a symbol of stillness and movement. \u201cThinking about water<\/keyword> and waves, my inner weather can find a resonance\u2013the water<\/keyword> constantly shifting, always in flux, yet contained, controlled,\u201d she told me. She also paints flowers: Narcissi, White Roses, Peace Lilies, Hyacinths<\/i>, all painted in 2021 and all white flowers. \u201cMy flower paintings are almost always about renewal. I love all flowers, but I think my favorites might be roses and peonies. I love the infolding, the lushness combined with discreteness, in both these flowers. And, of course, they each have a heavenly scent. I want to try and convey their exquisite perfume by conjuring it up with my paint-marks.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Celia Paul, Painter Seated in her Studio<\/em>, 2023; Oil on canvas, 72\u2033 x 58\u2033 from Celia Paul: Works 1975\u20132025<\/em> (MACK, 2024). Courtesy of Victoria Miro<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the monograph, Paul writes that the \u201cmain danger of painting self-portraits is, of course, the possibility of becoming a narcissist: to be so obsessed by one\u2019s own physique and inner thoughts that the outer world and other people have no relevance except as they relate to oneself.\u201d As she paints herself, she is scrutinizing the image. From her 1983 self-portrait through to the most recent in 2024, the scrutiny becomes softer, more gentle and open. Experience, aging and understanding are revealed. From 2021 to the last painting in the book, her palette lightens with more blue, yellow and white. \u201cI want the self-portraits I make from now on to convey a different sort of security. My recent self-portraits, which I am pleased with, owe their success to the power of defiance. \u2018I am a survivor,\u2019 they are clearly saying. I am self-enclosed, as if the paint were my armor.\u201d And yet, the paintings feel lighter, more accessible, easier.<\/p>\n

Proust is Paul\u2019s favorite writer, \u201cfor the beauty, the humor, the vulnerability, the love, the yearning.\u201d Proust often wrote about time and memory, and you can see the same in Paul\u2019s paintings, how aligned they are with interiority as well as scrutiny of the outside world. In Lydia Davis<\/a>\u2019s introduction of her excellent translation of Swann\u2019s Way<\/i>, she wrote: \u201c\u2026the importance of the role of the artist in transforming reality according to a particular inner vison: the artist escapes the tyranny of time through art.\u201d<\/p>\n

For 10 years, Paul was in a relationship with the painter Lucian Freud<\/a>, who bought her the flat in which she lives and works. He, in turn, was friends with Francis Bacon<\/a>, Frank Auerbach<\/a> and Michael Andrews<\/a>\u2014the so-called School of London. Paul painted the four men in Colony of Ghosts<\/i> (2023): \u201cThey represent home to me because I belong to them, even if they can\u2019t let me in.\u201d She was 18 when she and Freud became lovers, which they were until she was 28. Nearly four decades later, she writes: \u201cAll four men are now dead; they inhabit a different dimension.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Celia Paul, Colony of Ghosts<\/em>, 2023; Oil on Canvas, 121.9 x 182.9 cm., 48 x 72 in. \u00a9 Celia Paul Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In Swann\u2019s Way<\/i>, Proust wrote: \u201cAll these memories added to one another now formed a single mass, but one could still distinguish between them\u2013between the oldest, and those that were more recent, born of a fragrance, and then those that were only memories belonging to another person from whom I had learned them\u2013if not fissures, if not true faults, at least that veining, that variegation of coloring, which in certain rocks, in certain marbles, reveal differences in origin, in age, in \u2018formation.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Last year, Paul told me there wouldn\u2019t be any photographs in her monograph. \u201cI have been photographed too often. Photographs distract from the paintings. In photographs, I again become the model, not the artist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Paul\u2019s variegation of color veining through her paintings has moved from heavy to light. She has indeed stepped out from behind her \u201carmor of paint,\u201d she writes, \u201cand vulnerably engaging with myself and with my past, I might try to paint compassionate self-portraits which communicate a sense of peace to the people who look at them.\u201d In her 2023 portrait, Painter Seated in her Studio<\/i>, she is wearing her perennial paint-splattered smock, but this time it is a pale pink rose, as are the background, slippers and her skin. She seems rooted within the natural grace of a woman, looking out\u2014a strong yet soft face. It is her hands that offer her soul\u2013still, silent, at peace. A deeply moving work.<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/b>Colony of Ghosts<\/b><\/a>\u201d is at Victoria Miro through April 17, 2025. \u201c<\/b>CELIA PAUL: DIARIES<\/b><\/a>\u201d is at the Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert Gallery through May 2, 2025.<\/b><\/p>\n

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