Celia Paul. Life Painting

About

London-based painter Paul is best known for her emotionally charged portrait paintings of intimate subjects. As windows into complex inner worlds, Paul’s work captures a sense of quiet contemplation and offers a vision of interiority through a visceral rawness and immediacy. Fundamentally, Paul’s works are about the acts of being seen and seeing, being looked at and looking. Her paintings resonate with distinctive application of color, texture, and brushstrokes that explore the complexities and nuances of human connections. Her restrained color palette focuses on the subtle variations and tonalities of light, color, and shadows to convey mood and emotion. Nature is often the backdrop, but in the newer work is foregrounded to add symbolic layers to her emotional narratives.

Fiercely devoted to her painting practice, Paul has worked in the same studio for decades where she has “lived a life in art.” Situated high above the trees, her studio looks down on the courtyard of the British Museum. She paints in the same interior spaces where she sleeps—her view from her bed is in direct sightline with the museum. Due to both its proximity and contested history, the British Museum plays a suggestive role for Paul as she considers the generalized misogyny of the artworld and culture at large. Author and poet Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own also figures prominently in her vision of herself as a creative individual working toward self-realization as a woman artist. In British Museum at Night (2022-2023), Paul captures the formidable façade of the museum standing starkly behind the glowing lights of the central courtyard, all rendered in subtle washes of muted browns, tans, and oranges with pops of white for the lights and stars above.

Another influential concept in Paul’s career is depicted in My Father’s House (2020), a sun-bathed image with a lush garden in the foreground that almost obscures the pale gray outline of a house in the mid-ground. Delicate renderings of four young apple trees symbolize her four sisters and suggest the important role her family continues to play in her life. Portraits in the exhibition also represent key figures that have played a significant role in Paul’s career. Waiting Muse (After Gwen John) and Model both demonstrate the connection that Paul feels toward John, a Welsh artist (1876-1939) whose life paralleled Paul’s. Paul’s recent book Letters to Gwen John (2022) imagines a correspondence between the two artists and intimately records Paul’s reflections on a life devoted to painting. Both paintings render the subject’s body in confident and introspective repose—splayed as a cruciform in Model and gently motion-blurred in Waiting Muse—reflecting the solitary passion of an artist liberated by their creativity.

Of Paul’s numerous self-portraits, two works on view in the exhibition present different ways of engaging the world, and the public. Interior/Exterior depicts Paul on a green lounge chair, gazing frankly at the viewer, essentially cocooned in an enclosed interior space, while the heavily impastoed and textured surface of Paul’s paint-splattered studio dress alludes to the extraordinary effort of presenting one’s intimate self to the exterior world. In contrast, Painter Seated in her Studio presents Paul in her preferred seated portrait posture, with an expression that implies both inner reflection and quiet fortitude. The green bed the artist sits on perhaps echoes a landscape, thus transforming the scale of the artist into a colossus towering over her world. This dramatic portrait signifies the artist as full of power and self-possession in her artistic wisdom and command.

Paul’s three floral still-lifes also have deep symbolic meaning for Paul. White Rose, with its frontal pose and luminous representation evokes both strength in waiting and the beauty of renewal. Roses in the Studio also suggests the beauty of nature in the vibrant yellows and whites against the muted floorboards. Finally, the Vase of Dried Flowers evokes the beauty of permanence.

Paul grew up near the north Devon shore, and has included several images from that area, most prominently seascapes. For the artist, paintings of the ocean reflect emotional states of grief and sadness, or “inner weather.” Here the three seascapes present different times of the day from the quiet and melancholy of the early morning to the last burst of reds and oranges before the sun sets.