Her Own Witness

Celia Paul is filmed painting in her studio. Standing with her narrow back to the camera, she drags a bristle brush loaded with smoke-coloured paint across a small canvas on an easel. A thin grey ground has already been applied to it. She then dips the brush in a pot of turps and cleans it with a stained towel draped around her shoulders. She spends a great deal of time doing this, and all the while continues to look at her painting. The side of her face is visible, and thin puce lips twist into either a grimace or a wry smile. The effect is like that of watching a dog burying a bone, lodging a secret underneath the earth. Aside from her outstretched arm, she is, however, almost totally still.

In her studio, canvases lean against the walls, showing the stretcher crossbars. The splintery wooden floor is covered in oil paint. Paint-covered rags are mounded stiffly on a low brown couch. Other furniture: an easel, a small wicker chair with her palette resting on it, a chair for her sitters, and a large mirror with a timber frame that appears to have come from an enormous wardrobe. Paint tubes are lined against the wall: Payne’s Grey, Naples Yellow, Burnt Sienna, Prussian Blue. Brushes are set out to dry on the ground. The room is in her apartment on Great Russell Street, across from the British Museum. The light switches are covered in greasy prints of paint. In Paul’s bedroom: one busted armchair, its innards collapsing underneath it, a single cast-iron bed, and a linoleum floor the shade of burnt cherries.  

Photographers and filmmakers have savoured the austere conditions of Paul’s flat, up a flight of eighty stairs, where she has lived for some forty years. Documentarian Jake Auerbach (and son of the painter Frank Auerbach) collated footage taken over two decades to make the film Celia Paul: Private View in 2020. And it is just that, for at sixty-four, Paul is an intensely solitary painter. It is striking to see her in motion, particularly when she walks across the stumbling cliffs of Exmoor’s coastline and speaks to Auerbach about her childhood. She has a thin voice, but with the clarity of a singing wine glass. She is all silver, whiskery, and statue-like. So quiet and motionless does Paul appear, that it is surprising to realise that she isn’t made of flat paper, to be turned over like a page in a book. Paul herself has written: 

The studio is almost like a cloister: here the quiet work gets done.  

It seems unusual that Paul would turn to language to describe herself, her life, and her work. She is not a narrative painter, as Virginia Woolf wrote of Walter Sickert. She is primarily interested in the ‘zone of silence in the middle of every art’, that ‘region of very strong sensations’. Yet she has written two books. Like her paintings, the subject matter is private and personal. ‘I have chosen to use words, rather than paint, because words can communicate more directly. The hermetic language of painting necessarily keeps its secret: its power remains mysterious.’ The first book, Self Portrait, is a simple memoir. It considers her childhood, her family, and her relationship with Lucian Freud, and the chapters are interspersed with passages from her diary and poems written in her early twenties.  

Letters to Gwen John is composed of letters written to the Welsh painter Gwen John, dead some eighty years. It accounts for how both she and John have been known for their relationships with great male artists. Such associations have had a vexing influence on the ways in which their own bodies of work have been understood or interpreted, a disciplining effect on how they have been perceived. For Paul that artist is Freud, and for John it was her younger brother Augustus, and her lover Auguste Rodin. ‘I have explored,’ writes Paul in Granta, ‘the question of whether she and I are culpable, in ways we don’t quite understand, of our overshadowing by more famous male artists and whether it is necessary to us to paint, silently and secretly, under cover of these shadows. Whether it is exposure that we fear, above all.’  

Paul’s paintings give Self-Portrait its structure; time curdles around particular works. This is also the prevailing form in Letters to Gwen John, where all the little efforts of John’s life are situated gently in relation to the pictures she was making. In the figurative paintings for which she is best known, Paul often depicts the face and torso of her sitters, usually her family members and friends. Her paintings signal their autobiographical nature: the portrait is not just the image of a head, or the face of a stranger, or the mask of drama. It is encoded with a sense of deep familiarity, mysterious and non-specific. To render this vague, mute, and shimmering experience in prose seems a difficult task. Both of Paul’s books make clear that she is mostly interested in ‘the shadowy crime of painting’, and we learn much about how she sees and makes and thinks about art. Moments from Paul’s life are carved into scenes that stage the act of working – always working – on one painting after another. We think about the paintings she is describing, some of which are not reproduced. With the sighting of the canvas deferred, the reader begins to imagine paintings, an act which is deeply referential (one might think of Freud, Balthus, Sickert, the stiff forms of Nina Hamnett, the grey women of Vilhelm Hammershøi). When the images are reproduced only some pages later, they are quite unlike anything we might anticipate in composition and colour. They are striking in a way her prose is not: direct, unfettered. The past, for Paul, is shaped and convened around the development of paintings. Yet paintings don’t simply belong to time or mark it out; they exist in ‘a constant present’. They remake the scene of an encounter between an artist and model. For Paul, this collaboration remains visible in the image, and is kept alive there. There is a friction between word and image, undoing any imagined intimacies we might anticipate from this memoir: the painting will always be the nearest Paul will get to going in close.     

Paul has described a portrait as an event, one that captures the sitter in the moment of being perceived by the artist. Some sitters find ways to conceal themselves; others will give themselves up entirely to the portrait painter. She notices:

This relationship between sitter and painter – between what is an act of appearance and then one of perception – is what Paul attends to. She seemingly dips her paintbrush straight into this atmosphere: two people looking at each other in an empty room. Recently, she has resorted to painting self-portraits because of the ready availability of herself as a sitter. Looking at herself in the mirror, or conjuring up her face on the canvas, is an absorbing and confronting task: and Paul has repeated this task again and again. In a talk at Victoria Miro gallery in 2014, she described to Hilton Als the disappointment of seeing the dream of a painting reduced to something only approximate.  

If one has to try once more, to begin again, to get closer to painting the image that needs to be painted, why not go over things in words? These two books are not so much a matter of Paul’s explaining and re-shaping the past in text, but of approaching this act of self-portraiture by appealing to a new form. Self-portraits are both reflection and disguise; painting, Paul suggests, has an ambiguous and subterranean lexicon.  She would like for language to be the commanding instrument of coherence and precision – ‘send me a horsewhip so I can lash myself into action,’ she writes to her sister. Yet Paul mistrusts the written word a little. Freud’s letters are full of adoration and broken promises – such sneaky, clandestine sentences have not served her so well. To be clear-eyed is the aim of the painter and the memoirist. At the end of Letters to Gwen John she quotes Colette: ‘look at what gives you pleasure, and what gives you pain; but look longest at what gives you pain.’ 

She began painting because she liked it. It was a way of ‘guarding and controlling [her] inner life’. Born to Christian missionaries in Trivandrum, in South India, Paul was the fourth of five daughters. Her father was a theologian, who later became head of an evangelical community in Devon, where she spent her teenage years. One of her elder sisters recalled that Celia would sit so still in their garden, looking at the hibiscus, that butterflies would land on her. She was passionately in love with her mother; one of her earliest memories is of following her mother’s colourful skirt around the garden. When her younger sister Kate was born, she writes, ‘I was so traumatised by being displaced in my mother’s affections that I resolved to die.’ Diagnosed with leukaemia, she returned with the family to England. At boarding school she turned inward. She began to paint. 

She found objects in the woodlands and on the beaches during her holidays in Devon: ‘I arranged them to form still-lifes. I painted obsessively. Everything became heightened, and I saw things as if they were visions.’ In Self-Portrait she describes how she began to paint and draw, spurred on by her friendly competition with another student. She set up a wooden table in her shared bedroom at home, above the sitting room. Hearing her sisters chatter and laugh in the sitting room below, she would drum her feet on the floor to make them quiet: ‘they always obeyed and I had no feelings of guilt at being so bossy and demanding.’ Her immense will and ambition were already in demonstration. Recognising her talent, an art teacher sent a letter to Lawrence Gowing at The Slade School of Art in London where Paul was accepted at the age of sixteen (the diary extracts and poems in Self-Portrait were written during her time at the Slade). ‘Pictures unpainted make the heart sick,’ Gowing wrote to her reluctant father. 

Paul builds the book as one might build a wall: brick by brick, assembled slowly and dutifully. Across ten non-chronological chapters and a prologue, the writing is quick and light, direct and charged with a modest brevity. People are seen as if through a veil, and events do not really have gravity. She presents her landlord, her teachers and fellow students, her friends, her gallerist, her son – all as abstract entities. They might affect her with their emotional wants and needs, but ultimately nothing will knock her off her path. ‘There’s just blankness. Language dried up in me,’ Paul writes of her youth. Self-Portrait is too partial and restrained to be a true record of her life. Rather, it is an indication of what it means to live a life through painting, to come at life via the attendant faculties of making art, this refined sense of looking and feeling. Paul’s fidelity is to her painting. The pictures have a quiet intensity: time is being laid down in paint, ‘the sudden impact of the present is conveyed as a whole’. 

Yet clear sightedness is not just saved for the scene of painting; Self-Portrait brims with emotional injury. Paul examines scenes of death and separation with a startling frankness, but here events of birth and love have a bruising quality to them too. Underneath an appearance of prudish decorum, the body rustles with rude appetites. For Paul, in this first book at least, the most important figures in her life are her mother and Lucian Freud. Paul met Freud during a life drawing class at the Slade in 1978. She was eighteen years old and showed him some earlier drawings she had made of her mother’s legs, sketches of the backs of her knees. Paul notes that his face had the texture of wax, ‘it had an eerie glow as if it was lit from within, like a candle inside a turnip’. He wears expensive shoes and smokes a French cigarette. Freud admires her drawings and invites her to tea before they return to his flat. In the cab: ‘he took my hair and wound it around his fingers and started stroking my throat with a soft rotating movement.’ They become lovers; she suffers accordingly. Freud’s lovers, old and new, appear in her diary entries as so many dolls, dressed and coddled, then unceremoniously kicked under the sofa. Aptly, Julian Barnes has called Freud a ‘heart-squasher’. 

The first time Paul sat for Freud was in 1980 for the picture that would become Naked Girl with Egg (1980-81). She was uncomfortable, ‘conscious of [her] flesh’, and had difficulty posing on the low bed. Eventually she put her hand to her cheek and looked to the side, cupping her breast. ‘“That’s it!” he said. I knew that it was the way the skin of my breast rumpled under the touch of my hand that had attracted him.’ Paul cried throughout the sessions, hating the feeling of exposure that resulted from Freud’s intense scrutiny of her body. 

Her breasts reminded him of eggs, and to finish the painting, ‘he boiled an egg and cut it in half and placed it on a white dish. He painted the eggs in the dish in front of [her].’  When Paul posed for Girl In A Striped Nightshirt, Or Celia (1983-85), during and after her pregnancy, Freud was ‘repelled’ by the milk that had leaked onto her dress.  

Painter and Model (1986-1987), the last painting Freud did of Paul, signalled a shift in their relationship, which ended soon afterward. In it, she wears a red dress encrusted with oil paint, and stands next to a sofa bearing a sprawled naked man. Her feet, bare and meaty, stand on paint tubes scattered across the floor. ‘I felt honoured that Lucian should represent me in the powerful position of the artist,’ she writes, ‘his recognition was deeply significant to me. But underlying my pride, I felt wistful that I was no longer represented as the object of desire.’ Indeed, in the painting she looks dirty, eyes downturned, standing on the margins. She has neither canvas nor easel, just a paintbrush. Paul considered Freud’s work to be a matter of desire and power. He always started a picture by first painting what interested him most: the genitals. Her discomfort with being looked at once elicited a vicious letter: ‘Why do you have to make everything so complicated, shifty, and shameful?’ 

On the cover of Self-Portrait is a photograph of a young, confident Paul wearing a paisley dress. ‘I don't know what happened to that person with the Greek sandals,’ she says. Disappearance makes its way into her compositional practice, for her paintings are ‘fundamentally structured by loss’: ‘The scraping-off of layers of paint, again and again, the rebuilding, the losing again … in order to make a great painting you need to destroy paintings.’ She is haunted at night, she said to Jake Auerbach, by the images she has painted over and destroyed. ‘I am tormented by the memory of them.’ 

When she was studying at The Slade, Paul had difficulty drawing the life-models who were brought in for the students to study: ‘it seemed so artificial to me to draw a person one didn’t know or have any involvement with … I needed to work from someone who mattered to me.’ Hence the many pictures Paul completed of her mother. The titles of the paintings are beautiful: My Mother with a Necklace (1982), My Mother with a Ring (1982), My Mother and God (1990), My Mother and the Sea (1999), My Mother with a Rose (2006), My Mother and the Mountain (1994-2020). In My Mother as St Brigid dreaming (1983), her mother’s watery green sweater mingles with seaweed-coloured hills; she appears to emerge from the earth like the eldest of shrubberies. My Mother with Shining Eyes (1983) is all claret, russet, and rhubarb. Her mother’s thick fingers seem as if they would struggle with the fine, fabric-covered buttons of her dress. The face is like a deep lake: ripples glittering on the surface, the murky dance of the undertow. Her eyes, in Paul’s words, ‘hold two little stars, one in each eye, little dazzling pinpoints … [She] has a pleading expression, as though she is seeing a vision and is pleading for help.’ There is a simple mysteriousness to Paul’s many paintings of her mother. One can imagine what a Paul painting of a woman holding a flower will look like, the dull fudgy features emerging from the canvas. But to land on these reproductions is something quite different: her face flickers with a perceptible fear that she could slide too much into a sullen or saintly expression. Mother and daughter, model and artist make a mute pact to wait for revelation. It is a scene of supreme devotion:  

When her father died, Paul set out to paint her sisters and mother in mourning. Family Group, (1984-6) was started when Paul was twenty-four and pregnant. The canvas is large, about two metres wide, and the work took two years to complete. ‘The paint is thick and pervaded by a feeling of grief’, while ‘[her] mother is gazing out beseechingly at the viewer, she is vulnerable.’ The four sisters crowd around their mother on a low bed, faces raw from crying.  Despite the wincing eyes and contorted lips, the figures resemble the sticky clods of muscle in Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox (1655) or Soutine’s Carcass of Beef (1926), flesh piled sordidly onto a mattress, a family in ruins, gleaming with decay. It seems also to be an image concerned very much with control: how to contain the circulating grief and misery to this little bed crushed between two tight walls. This is where Paul will show her most intensely private self: in the wilfulness of her paintings.  

Paul shares her palette with other British painters. There are the low-toned colours of Walter Sickert, his grubby green-blacks and slabs of brown-grey, with the occasional dabs of flake white. Freud’s rosy and calloused pinks, the ginger brown, the softest yellow primrose. Gwen John’s felicitous use of greys, with many cool tones as we might find in pigeon feathers, or the warmer tints of street-paving stones. 

In 2012 the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester held a joint exhibition of John and Paul’s paintings. Paul has cited John as an inspiration: on a shelf in her studio sits a postcard of The Convalescent. A decade after the exhibition and over seventy years after John’s death, Paul claimed John as an interlocutor and published Letters to Gwen John. Each letter is like a small boat half stocked with cargo that disappears at the lip of the horizon. Is it not a wilful act of egotism — to communicate with and, in so doing, claim a great, dead artist? The project does not diminish John, however, nor does Paul seek to assert her presence too boldly through overidentification. While at first the book poses the question of what it means to be described as an artist ‘in her own right’ (an off-putting label suggestive of shadowy social connections and maybe a fair sum of money), it is a book about an undivided dedication to making paintings.

Letters to Gwen John is a far more revealing book than Self-Portrait.  John’s injunction ‘to say what I mean exactly’ is felt keenly in Paul’s approach to her task of letter-writing. By bringing John into the room, Paul becomes firmer and franker with her own autobiographical material, identifying the commonalities between them. In this mode they share the burden of self-disclosure. Paul addresses her letters to ‘dearest Gwen’ and signs off ‘with a handshake’ as van Gogh did in his letters to his brother Theo. The volume shifts between letters to John and shorter chapters that cover John’s life. Then there are reflections on Paul’s own life: her friendship with Hilton Als, the illness and eventual death of her husband, Stephen Kupfer. Most importantly, the volume contains Paul’s enigmatic and lucid descriptions of John’s paintings: 

John’s paintings demonstrate a sense of gratitude for simple things, say, the way the sun pours itself over her armchair at different points in the day. Or the way a shiny brown teapot looks nestled between a chalky pink cup and the violet wash of a blue dress sleeve. The intensity of her paintings, no taller than twenty four inches, comes ‘from their beauty’, Paul has said. John painted many pictures of nuns from the convent at Meudon, near Paris, where she later lived; this included the foundress Mere Poussepin, whom she painted from a prayer card. There are also the recurring paintings of women in stippled blue dresses with their hair parted and eyes drilling down on some object in their lap – a book or some sewing. One of her models recounted: ‘she takes down my hair and does it like her own ... she has me sit as she does, and I feel the absorption of her personality as I sit.’ When John’s sitters do return her gaze, their eyes are assertive and injurious: they perceive the painter just as well as she sees them. These figures are challenging in their composure and quietness. 

For both Paul and John, it is not the artist’s eye which is unforgiving, but her purpose. They are equally ruthless in the pursuit of solitude. Paul’s son was raised by her mother and her late husband kept his own apartment; she has always lived alone. John secluded herself outside of Paris until she took flight to Dieppe, in a last attempt to view the sea, before her death in 1939. John once wrote: ‘As to whether I have anything worth expressing that is apart from the question. I may never have anything to express, except this desire for a more interior life.’ Solitude, Paul has said, is a strong decision:  

To relinquish this isolation would be to give up on that burning and singular ambition; what seems like self-effacement is, in fact, an ardent act of self-preservation. She must be her own witness.  

Paul’s archive becomes, in these conditions of necessary refusal, a testament to intimacy and human touch, deep affection, seeing, being seen. ‘You don’t get to heaven in twos or threes,’ said John, ‘one can only get to heaven alone’. Discipline is key. Paul herself seems a tough master: notes on the studio wall read keep tone down. reduce scale. NO HIGHLIGHTS. When her mother didn’t assume the correct position for a painting, Paul shouted at her: ‘I was very cruel. She cried and said that I was treating her like an object. I responded irritably to her tears and said that she didn’t believe in me. She complied and continued to pose for me, day after day.’ When she writes about Freud’s Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau) (1981-3) she notes that the taps above the corner washbasin are painted running, only Lucian – ‘like God’ – could make them stop. Such mastery was aspiration also for Gwen John, who worked in a state of self-imposed privation: she wanted to become a saint.  

In the pages of Letters though, Paul’s seriousness takes on a more subdued air, her apparent apprehension and emotional stiffness giving way to self-deprecating reflection. She paints a copper beech tree and feels exultant: ‘I may have done something remarkable. The tree resembles a controlled explosion … It is a gentle, moody, drifting image and I am very pleased with it.’ Returning to her easel the next morning, she finds that the painting clearly does not work. It is a suffocated and dense image. ‘I wish I could have learned from all my years of experience that ecstasy should be distrusted.’  

Many of Paul’s most recent paintings are of nature. The surface of the canvas is that of some chalky ground which has suffered the rain to beat down upon it and turn it all to clay. She has turned to painting portraits of the ocean since the death of her mother. Not being able to paint the latter’s face has been a challenge. Instead she paints the plane tree branches outside her window, the facade of the British museum, the BT tower in the distance. She has also painted flowers, her sister Kate, and many more self-portraits. All show her with twisted lips, and a rose blush around her nose and mouth, as if she has been scrubbed heartily with a wet washcloth. They are not beautiful paintings, but they have a certain commanding collectedness. ‘You say,’ she writes to Gwen, ‘I must get back to my painting. I’ll do that now.’