Celia Paul

(British, born 1959)

Steve in the Studio 152 x 126.6 cm. (59 3/4 x 49 3/4 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
With Marlborough Gallery, London
Private Collection, Denmark

Celia Paul's scrutinizing figurative practice naturally aligns her output with post-war artists such as Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud (a former lover of Paul's). Yet Paul also finds kinship with early modern portraitists such as Gwen John – to whom Paul addressed her 2022 memoir Letters to Gwen John. Like each of these artists, Paul's practice is autobiographical. In her stripped back Bloomsbury studio overlooking the British Museum, she paints people and places dear to her, with a continuous rigour that reveals an acutely intimate portrait of the artist's existence.

This personal narrative is perhaps most discernible in Paul's portraiture. Her subjects are often family, who undertake the heavy task of sitting for her time and again. Her sisters, mother and son have been frequent sitters – as has her husband Steven, the subject of the present work. Paul considers the closeness of her sitters as crucial to the success of each work, stating 'It is quite telling of portraiture that love shines through. It is one of the reasons I know I can't paint people I don't love. ' (Celia Paul, 'The Guardian', Celia Paul on life after Lucian Freud, 27 October 2019).

In returning to these loved subjects over and over, always confining them to the quiet of her studio space and painting them with an unvetted directness – Paul achieves multifaceted images. They are at once meditative contemplations on human relationships and the passage of time, yet also powerful statements on the very act of portrait painting. With each of Paul's series of sitters we witness different dynamics; 'mother and daughter', 'sibling', 'parent and child', and here 'partner'.

Both sitter and artist, husband and wife, have given insight into such sittings. Steven states:

'I have sat for Celia many times over the past twenty years, and know how exigently she requires one's conscious presence. She detects any glazing over of my eyes, any failure of being there present in the studio. Yet though fully conscious of where I am and what I am doing, my eyes are hardly ever focused upon the studio or Celia herself, who is in my field of vision. I am not looking at what is around me, indeed though my eyes are open I am not looking at all. One is gazed at intensely without returning the regard, but always in some way aware of the gaze. There is a close connection between this scenario and the paintings Celia creates. The qualities of stillness and intensity characterise them along with the strange intimacy of an interaction when nothing is said and no glances are interchanged.' (Steven Kupfer, Celia Paul – Painting Her Life, victoria-miro.com, 2014).

And Paul recalls that to achieve the conscious presence he speaks off, that Steven dotingly 'prepares himself the night before he sits. He used to think about philosophy when he sat for me, but this always made him dream. He would see all sorts of strange forms in my painting clothes, which he was staring at as he thought, and he would soon fall asleep. Now he memorises cryptic crossword clues the night before and solves them in his head as he sits... He likes the challenge of it all, and his ritual is part of the pleasure he takes in sitting' (Celia Paul, Self-Portrait, Random House, London, 2019).