It was the fifth of September, 2023. The street where I was standing was full of people, most of them on their way in or out of London’s British Museum, which sat right behind me. The sky was perfectly blue, the air was warm, and the sun’s rays, I had noticed only a few seconds before, glowed against my skin. Everything around me cried summer—the tourists wore shorts, T-shirts, skirts, sunlight flashed off glass and metal and made the white stone of the museum shine—but the sensation I had was of autumn. It wasn’t the date, I wasn’t thinking of the fact that it was September, it was something about the light, it had a different fullness, and that created a different space. It was as if summer, self-assured after having been allowed to rule unopposed for so long, still hadn’t noticed that it was in a new place, and simply carried on as before.
I was there to meet Celia Paul. I had been interested in her paintings for a long time, in their distinctive combination of weightlessness and heaviness. The physical, material world that they depicted seemed light in some peculiar way, while their emotional presence was always heavy: the paintings were grounded in feelings. Usually it is the other way around, isn’t it, the material world has weight, and the inner, the spiritual, the abstract are light, and ungraspable, really. There was another aspect of the paintings that fascinated me—namely, that on a certain level there was something timeless about them. The majority of the paintings were portraits, and not only were their subjects mostly depicted in a bare, neutral room, devoid of things or objects that might date it, they were also most often shown wearing plain, monotone, smocklike clothes. In the paintings that were not portraits, the most frequently recurring motif was water, and in particular sea surfaces, which move in time but cannot be fixed in it. This timelessness ran against another tendency, which was that most of the portraits Paul painted were of people close to her—especially her mother and four sisters, but also her father, her son, and the two partners in her life. In other words, we were in her time, Celia Paul’s own time.
She lives on the top floor of the building I was standing in front of. I knew from her autobiography that she had lived there since the eighties, that she also worked there, and that only people she had explicitly invited were allowed to set foot inside. I had been invited, but even so I had to wipe the sweat from my palms before pressing the intercom button. A reply came immediately. The kindness in the voice was apparent even through the small, crackly speaker. There was a buzz, I went in and walked up four flights of stairs, slightly out of breath as I reached the top. The door was already open, and Celia Paul stood waiting in the hallway inside.
“I’m not a portrait painter,” Paul once wrote. “If I’m anything, I have always been an autobiographer.” She paints her life. This implies that she also paints her place. She was born in 1959 in India, where her parents were Christian missionaries, and one painting, “My First Home” (2016), shows the house she grew up in, shining forth with the luminosity of an early memory. Another painting, “My Father’s House” (2020), shows the home the family moved to in the early eighties, when Paul’s father was appointed Bishop of Bradford, in England. It depicts a stately, withdrawn structure, surrounded by green, under an all-encompassing light. Paul had been twenty-one at the time, in her final year at the Slade School of Art, using her bedroom as a studio. It was there, she has said, that she became a real painter. Her father died just two years later, from a brain tumor.
Paul’s central place, however, is the flat in London. A common motif is the museum building outside the windows, painted in countless variations. Another is the soaring BT Tower, it, too, visible through her windows, and the spire of St. George’s, seen through a window on the other side of the flat. There are many pictures of a bed in a room, that is the room where Paul sleeps. Then, there are the portraits, which were largely painted in the apartment, and, of course, the many self-portraits, where she has stood alone in front of her easel and painted her own face.
When I followed her into the flat on this early-autumn day, it was therefore a little like stepping into a painting. I recognized the floor, worn and dark and made of linoleum, I recognized the plain, white walls, I recognized the window facing the museum, the light that fell through it. And Paul’s face was so familiar that it might have belonged to one of my close friends. But—and this struck me at once—reality is always much more than that which can be fixed in images, infinitely more. The other’s face continually changing, one’s own thoughts in constant flux. The various surfaces, the way light is reflected off each of them, always shifting. The history of objects, and what they signal about status, class, the personality of their owner. Every single moment is so full of information that you could spend a lifetime surveying it. So what we do is look for patterns, for whatever can be fitted into a stable structure. It is a way of managing reality: we must be able to pull out a chair and sit without expending time on the chair itself. And why should we spend time on a chair, anyway? What point would there be in taking a closer look at it, in seeing what it is really like?
In 2020, Paul painted the same chair three times. It stands in an empty room, bathed in the light of a window to the right. Nearly every detail in the room is erased, the only things that can be discerned are the floor and the wall. It is a moment, but nearly all the information it contained has been removed.
The painting seems alive. The chair is not alive, the wall and the floor are not alive, and the light is not alive. And yet the painting seems just that, alive. This is, I think, because the painting consists of encounters. The chair first meets the gaze of the painter, who paints a chair on a canvas. It emerges brushstroke by brushstroke, in a long-drawn-out moment, continually adjusted, and there are two chairs in play, one of them unchanging in a changeable moment, which is the chair in the room, and another changeable in an unchanging moment, which is the chair on the canvas. The painting is alive in the sense that it arises out of a process, led and corrected by the artist’s gaze, but also by her ideas, emotions, and expectations, until she considers the painting finished and it is our gaze it encounters. We see not the chair in itself, as that is for sitting on, but the moment it represents, the here and now it lifts forth. Not the world, but our connection to the world.
Shouldn’t someone have been sitting in that chair? In a strange way, the absence of a person reveals another presence, for, though the room is certainly empty, it vibrates with life, and it does so because someone sees it, and that someone exists in the painting, in its colors and shapes. Feelings have charged it, and when we look at it the gaze and the feelings, which lie latent in it, are released. Paul’s self-portraits, which make up a considerable part of her œuvre, share this presence, but in them the presence is complicated, since the artist’s gaze is not merely fused with the elements of the painting but articulated directly: the painter sees herself looking at us. What happens when the interior gazes at its own exterior and paints it, like a chair?
It is easy to think art that leans toward the autobiographical is first and foremost a representation of things or events. But the essential fact about art is that it is an event in itself. It is something that comes into being.
In her flat, Paul and I stood chatting for a short while in her living room, which was almost entirely empty of furniture, before she showed me into her studio, it, too, stripped of furniture. The floor was covered in paint specks, in the corner was a pile of old paint tubes and smocks. A couple of new portraits were mounted on easels. We looked at them for a long time. She asked me if I wanted some coffee, I said yes to that, and we went into the kitchen, which faced south and was full of light. A table stood there, along with some chairs, and the walls were full of family photographs. Paul was friendly, shy, her voice low and soft. She smiled a lot, often with downcast eyes. We talked about our children, and also about her grandchildren, we talked about the summer that had passed and about literature and artists.
I asked her about Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” which she mentions in her autobiography. She talked about how gripping and terrifying it is, how alive, despite being a century and a half old. “Dostoyevsky’s writing makes me think of Francis Bacon’s portraits,” she said. “All the action seems to happen within a closed, claustrophobic space where the figures are garishly lit, like actors on a dark stage.”
I asked if there was something of Dostoyevsky in her paintings.
“When I paint interiors, I sometimes think of him, because my perspective is emotional rather than representational,” she said. “I always imagine the floorboards in a Dostoyevsky room to slope vertiginously, to echo the highly strung emotions of the characters. But my favorite writer is Proust. I think about him almost every day. How he weaves the present and past together.”
Paul had an exhibition coming up at the Victoria Miro gallery in London. It was called “Colony of Ghosts,” and it drew its title from a work she was going to paint, inspired by a famous photograph—it showed Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, and Michael Andrews, had I seen it? No, I hadn’t, and I went with her into the next room, where she looked for a book with the photo in it. She found it and handed it to me.
The photograph, titled “The Last Supper,” was taken by John Deakin in 1963. It wasn’t difficult to understand why it had become iconic. There they sat, three of the greatest British painters of the century—Bacon, Freud, and Auerbach—side by side in a Soho restaurant, at the start of the sixties, together with their now somewhat less famous but then just as well-known colleague Michael Andrews, in addition to a younger painter named Timothy Behrens, who sat for Freud at the time. The meal appears not to have begun yet, the napkins are still standing upright on the plates like small checkered sails, and a large loaf of bread lies unsliced on a platter. Andrews is seated to the far right, he is holding a cigarette and looking down in front of him with a smile on his lips. To his right sits Auerbach, he has a cigarette in his mouth, and he is holding out a match to the man next to him, that’s Bacon, who is bowing his head to light a cigarette. In front of Bacon is an ice bucket with a bottle of champagne. Next to him sits Freud, wearing a suit and tie and looking down at the table, as if set apart from everything around him. On Freud’s other side is the young Behrens, who appears to be wriggling uncomfortably in his chair while holding on to a glass of wine.
I knew that Paul had been in a lengthy relationship with Freud, and that she’d had a child with him, Frank, named for Auerbach. They had met when she was eighteen and studying at Slade. He was fifty-five and a visiting tutor there, a world-famous artist. Their relationship lasted for ten years. All artists must struggle to find their place; for Paul that struggle has been more complicated and, in a certain sense, more extreme because of her association with Freud. Her autobiography describes the struggle from within. “By writing about myself in my own words, I have made my life my own story,” she writes. “Lucian, particularly, is made part of my story rather than, as is usually the case, me being portrayed as part of his.”
So, for Paul, the picture she showed me wasn’t just an iconic photograph of some famous artists but a picture of people she’d had a deeply personal relationship to—taken when she was three years old, long before she knew them.
She said I could come back and look at the painting when it was done, if I wanted to.
I said I did.
So it was that six months later, in March, 2024, I stood in the street outside the British Museum and rang Paul’s doorbell again. The air was cold, it couldn’t have been more than forty or so degrees, although the sun was shining.
I was excited about what I was about to see. It felt as if I had been initiated into something, a process from the moment when nothing concrete existed, just an idea about a future painting, to when it manifested itself as a physical reality in the world. And it wasn’t just any painting, it was a painting of a time that no longer existed—four of the five men in the photograph were dead. Finally, the men were painters, three of them still hugely significant. Celia Paul was a painter, and, no matter how self-effacing she was as a person, it was impossible, I thought, that there wouldn’t be an element of competition, an element of combat, in the work, if only as negation, something she had to shake off in order to be firmly rooted in herself.
One of the best and most striking passages in Paul’s autobiography deals with artistic jealousy, as it unfolded when she was a teen-ager at boarding school and became close friends with a girl named Linda, whom she drew and painted with; a fierce competition developed, which culminated when Paul discovered a painting her friend had made in secret. It was very beautiful, and Paul writes, “the surge of jealousy I felt was sickening and I thought I was going to pass out.” These are powerful, intense emotions, and I think all artists have felt them. There is the abyss of self-doubt and insecurity on one hand, the desire to create something unique and universally admired on the other, and jealousy and envy in the middle. We are in the netherworld of emotions here, and no matter how existentially complete a work of art may be, no matter how rich and life-giving it appears, it has arisen out of something incomplete, where the mean, banal, and petty-minded live side by side with the most sublimely visionary thought, and where it isn’t clear which of them holds precedence.
But before that? In his book about Francis Bacon, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze writes about “the painting before painting.” There is no such thing as an empty canvas, something is always already there—historical ways of painting, contemporary ways of painting, your own way of painting, clichés, the culture’s entire repertoire of motifs and methods. If you are going to paint a man or a chair in front of you, you have to force your way through the whole thicket of inner images, as the painting has to emerge in its own right, and for this to happen it can’t be governed by what was there before, it has to be present in the moment. All art, I dare to affirm, is about getting to that point. And here self-doubt and inadequacy offer an access. Not being able, not knowing—that is the starting point of creation. Such a thing as a new beginning, a place emptied of the past, of course doesn’t really exist, but the moment exists, and if we are able to disregard ourselves we can become a part of it instead of it being a part of us.
This is what I see in Paul’s “Ghost of a Girl with an Egg” (2022), which is not just an obvious reference to Lucian Freud’s “Naked Girl with Egg,” from four decades earlier—it is a copy of it, with an extremely complex relationship among painter and model and painting. Freud’s painting depicts a naked woman reclining on a bed, one hand pressed to her breast, the other resting under a cheek, and on a small table in the foreground there is a bowl with a boiled egg sliced in half. The model is Celia Paul, twenty at the time the picture was painted. As in so many of Freud’s nudes, the attention is directed toward the skin, all its surfaces, folds, and curves, and still, fifty years on, there is something shockingly direct about them, devoid of beautification, naked the way animals are naked, but with human bashfulness intact. When Paul paints the same motif more than forty years later, the pose is the same, the egg is the same, but the light is nocturnal, the colors pale, clouded. The body is white and ghostly, quite without the original painting’s brutal attention to reality. While the gaze in Freud’s painting is fairly neutral, the gaze in Paul’s painting is not. It appears, rather, to be charged—with what, it is up to the viewer to determine, but in my eyes the gaze is filled with distaste, a kind of withheld dismay. The most interesting difference lies in the bodily presence, which is so much fainter in Paul’s painting—because of the light, which in Freud’s picture falls in the daytime, and also because the corporeal in Paul’s painting is about to fade away, as if it isn’t reality she has painted but a memory of it. We see Paul’s gaze seeing Freud’s gaze on her. And not only is the gaze doubled, and the roles reversed from model to painter, but Paul is also painting as Freud here, she is retracing his steps with her brush, becoming him—she is a ghost model, he is a ghost painter. The result is frightening, as it must be when the boundaries between usually distinct entities—past and present, art and reality, power and powerlessness—become unclear.
A model is of course an object, but in Paul’s paintings the object, this person sitting on the chair or reclining on the sofa, is drawn into a relationship, and this relationship is often the real subject of the picture.
“I need to know the person well, or at least feel some emotional connection, for a portrait to succeed,” Paul told me. “I started painting my mother when I was seventeen. I realized immediately that I had found my subject. I painted her again and again—for over thirty years she sat for me twice a week. Over the years, the portraits of her deepened and became more compassionate. When my four sisters sit for me, there is a particular atmosphere due to the silence in the room. They are remembering my mother—who had sat with them for me in earlier portraits—and they are remembering their childhood, as well as thoughts about their own children and families.”
Two major paintings in Paul’s œuvre are undoubtedly “Family Group” (1984-86) and “My Sisters in Mourning” (2015). Both are group portraits, the first of her mother and four sisters seated on a bed, the second of her sisters. In the first, the mother forms the center of the painting. She sits in the middle of the bed looking out of the picture, her hands folded over a long multicolored skirt. The daughters seated around her are all looking in different directions. One is looking at her, another lies with her head on a pillow and her eyes closed, a third gazes away to the left, and the last looks down before her. The five women are also distinct in their clothing and facial features, the picture abounds in clear, individualizing detail, and one might think that this would pull the painting in many different directions, creating a visual unrest, but for some reason the opposite effect arises, these five women are united. We see a little of the room where the bed is standing, and the feeling of space is heightened by a mirror on the wall behind it, but the women take up almost the entire surface of the painting. It was made after the death of Paul’s father. In the painting, there is caring (the one who is looking at the mother), there is rest (the one lying with eyes closed), and there is loneliness (the one looking away, the one looking down, the mother gazing into space). But there is a strong sense of community, too, and that is what the painting radiates. That they leave one another in peace, allow one another to be alone, is precisely what unites them in the inverted logic of loss. It is an astounding painting about grief.
“My Sisters in Mourning,” painted thirty years later, shares the same motif and theme but is very different in its execution. The four sisters sit close together, dressed in similar long, loose, and featureless dresses, all with their hands in their laps, against a background of subdued color. None of the visual information found in “Family Group” is present here—it could be anywhere, anytime. The only thing that differentiates the sisters is their facial features, but those are not very pronounced, either. Another unifying factor is the light, which comes in from the left, falls upon the back of the figure seated at the edge, erases the contours of her dress, lies around her head like a halo, lights up the cheek of the next figure, and also shines, somewhat more muted, upon the faces of the last two.
The difference between the two pictures is striking. They depict the same sisters, gathered in the same situation—sorrow at the death of a loved one—but in the first picture the emphasis is on external differences, and the sense of fellowship comes from within. In the other picture, it is as if the fellowship is marked by external similarities—the dresses, the poses, the light that shines upon them all. None of the women are looking at one another, they are sitting each in her separate world, looking inward. It is, I imagine, more an image of grief as an entity, the grief that has taken possession of these people, the way grief has always taken possession of people, while the first picture is of a particular situation of grieving, it belongs to the people we see, there and then. If one takes a step back and regards the pictures at a greater distance, there is one thing they have in common: there are no sharp edges between the persons in either group, there are no visible conflicts, no obvious competition, no one is asserting herself at the expense of anyone else.
When I visited Paul the first time, and she told me about the picture she was planning to paint, she mentioned this dynamic, how different the group portrait of the four artists would have to be from the group portraits she had painted of her sisters. If a friendship existed between the artists, it was hardly without competition, envy, egoism, and idiosyncrasy.
As on the previous occasion, only a few seconds elapsed from when I pressed the intercom button until the sound of her voice came over the speaker. And, as before, she received me in the hallway with a smile. We chatted for a few minutes about what had happened since, and then she brought me into the studio to show me the painting.
There wasn’t just one painting in there, there were three.
The first depicted four of the painters at the restaurant in Soho in 1963. But all the details of the photograph had been eliminated; in the painting they were seated behind an empty table in an empty room, and they were sitting very erect, side by side. Nothing was going on between them, nothing was going on in front of them, it was just them—Freud, Bacon, Auerbach, Andrews. All four were peering straight ahead, out of the picture. The wall behind them was greenish, and the table, wavily painted, was green in the shadows. The only object that remained from the photograph was a round painting that had hung on the wall. Here, it resembled a porthole, as if the four were sitting aboard a ship. All that green gave me an underwater feeling. What kind of world they were in wasn’t easy to say, other than that it wasn’t this one. They looked out at us from the past, that sunken world, the realm of the dead.
Directly opposite this picture, which was large, there hung another newly painted picture. It was a self-portrait, also large, and it depicted Paul in a color-flecked painter’s smock, reclining on a green chaise longue. Visually, the smock dominated the image—with all its spots of color, it resembled an abstract painting itself—but the emotional center was the face. It was painted with clear, coarse brushstrokes, typical of Paul’s self-portraits—the head small, the mouth broad, the hair dark and tight—and the face was turned toward the viewer. But it was as if the eyes looked past, at something else. They lacked the self-examining quality that so many of her self-portraits have. This was not a soul laid bare but one that sat there and let something come to it.
Hanging like this, it was as if Freud, Bacon, Auerbach, and Andrews were peering at Paul from the depths of that lost world, while she peered back at them from this one. So much was in motion in that room. Death, the past, art, longing, all of it sent whirling and made current by the two paintings. The men were painted as they had looked at the beginning of the sixties, at the height of their careers, but although they are next to one another and practice the same profession, the picture doesn’t radiate any sense of fellowship, they are sitting there singly. The figures’ passivity and the fact that they are lined up in a row made me think of defendants seated in the dock. The presence of the self-portrait, the painter who sits back to look at her work, complicates the image, for we see Freud, Bacon, Auerbach, and Andrews the way she sees them, but we also see her seeing, and that creates a distance in her gaze upon them, opening up a space for the viewer.
The third painting was of a tree, almost explosively present.
I stood for a long time looking at these paintings, which charged one another in such peculiar yet intense ways. They took hold of the room, and they took hold of me. Not until we left the studio and went into the kitchen to drink coffee and chat about this and that, as we had done the first time, did the impressions of the paintings slowly dissolve, for there everything was in motion, the words, the thoughts, the light, our hands, and reality’s jumble of unsurveyable detail, new at every glance. But now, as I write this nearly eight months later, in October, 2024, it is the paintings that I remember, and the feelings they left in me. Of course this is so, because they depicted presence—of the past, of the painter, of the tree—and what you have once been close to stays with you. ♦
This is drawn from “Celia Paul: Works 1975-2025.”
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