The Mystery of the Medium

By Tilda Walker

Celia Paul’s first book, and the one that introduced me to her work, is entitled Self-Portrait. Though her recent exhibition at Victoria Miro, ‘Colony of Ghosts’, is named after her painting of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews, it could just as fittingly be called the same; if there is a ghostly presence tangible in that converted factory in Islington, it is that of the artist herself. Paul confirmed as such when I met her later that afternoon: “Both my writing and my painting are autobiographical. Even if it’s something as universal as a seascape, it’s autobiographical.”

To ease into the conversation, I began with some questions I had from the exhibition. A couple of small portraits I was curious about: one reminiscent of a Raphael drawing of the Virgin Mary that I found particularly moving, and another in which a reclining man pushed against the borders of the canvas. She tells me the first is her granddaughter, the second her son, goes on to ask me if I noticed how the latter was mirrored by another small horizontal painting of a headland in the opposite corner, a metaphorical echo of the “rock” that is her son Frank. I had to admit I hadn’t. The whole exhibition is, in fact, balanced this way, with the landscapes (and more often seascapes) acting as “a sort of interlude, like a musical symphony.” She equally draws on literary comparisons, drawing an analogy to Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. “It starts off with this extraordinary description of the heath, and then gradually zooms in onto focusing in intense detail on the characters.”

However, these paintings aren’t just breathing space for the portraits, but deeply emotive and meaningful in themselves. The seascapes are all from the last 11 years, beginning in the final stages of her mother’s dementia and especially following her death in 2015. “When she died, everything felt kind of fractured and broken, and I thought that the visual equivalent of this fracturing is water. I started to paint seascapes then, and waterfalls and streams, to do with the broken quality of water.”

She also tells me how this loss also “set in motion the idea that I needed to write,” in part as a homage to her mother who was “much more of a literary person than a painterly person.” But there’s a philosophy behind it too, a realisation of the prose-like nature of life set in relief by her mother’s death. “When someone dies, it’s their whole life, it’s her childhood, her motherhood, her old age, in one kind of whole, and I felt that I needed to make an equivalent whole out of my own life.” Writing, for Paul, is something that she is “driven to” by “something like grief or a love affair, something that needs to be really confronted […] I need to write because I need to be able to make sense of it.”

It's writing as this personal project that Paul emphasises, the way writing can put her thoughts in order. Despite having published two books, Self-Portrait and more recently Letters to Gwen John, she is very modest about her literary output. “I don’t use words very easily,” she professes. “A lot of writers that I know are so at ease with words that they’re very fluent. And I’m not. I’m very hesitating but precise. […] Words don’t just spin out of me at all, and it matters to me, getting the right word, which will convey an image. For me, the best writers — the writers that mean most to me — are visual.” This list includes Proust (“you actually see the people when you’re reading him, and you see the hawthorn blossoms, and you see the room he’s in”), Charlotte Brontë (“she is a painter”), Jean Rhys and Karl Ove Knausgård. Though she loves Kazuo Ishiguro, she feels he’s less hers. “You know when you meet somebody in a room and you feel an instant connection, I think there might not be that between me and him.” The conversation meanders around writers. Talk of Emily Brontë brings up Anne Carson’s The Glass Essay which she insists I read; “it’s really had a deep influence on me.”

The difference to when she speaks of painting is marked. It’s difficult to describe in any words but her own… “less cerebral, more physical”, “it comes from a different part of my body […], more from the stomach area and it extends up my arm into my hand,” “more like a dance”. “I think I would go completely mad, and I wouldn’t be able to survive if I didn’t paint” may seem like hyperbole, but from Paul’s mouth it appears entirely sincere.

I ask her if she still writes poetry. The question seems to have hit a mark just to the left of the reality of it. She doesn’t write it per se, but rather “it sometimes just comes to me, you know like a song or something.” So much for not having a way with words. Poetry seems to marry the therapy of writing with the spirituality of painting. Poems intersperse her diary entries in Self-Portrait, and there “it’s as if I’ve soared above the chaos of my private life and gained some kind of distance and clarity and purity.” The image of musical interludes returns as she draws a parallel between the poems and her landscape paintings. More generally, she asserts that poetry has more in common with painting than any other art form, “something to do with the mystery of the medium.”

In fact, Paul acknowledges the interconnected nature of all her creations, noting that her self-portraits “got much stronger” after beginning to write: “it’s a way of understanding myself.” This quest for self-knowledge is what she explores in her contribution to the monograph which has been released in conjunction with the recent exhibition. Entitled ‘Painting Myself’, the essay centres around ideas of identity and belonging, tracing her initial difficulties creating self-portraits and concluding with their importance for a self-recognition which transcends any narcissism.

For Paul, this self-recognition is deeply connected to her past. “I feel more and more that I am very much the same person that I’ve always been.” I wonder aloud about the connection between identity and place. It seems to me that she seeks out this continuity, living in the same Bloomsbury apartment — that which Lucian Freud bought for her — since she was 22. There she is cohabiting with her younger self, and possibly his presence too. Her ghostly painting of the Brontë Parsonage come to mind, as does the phantom-filled “My First Home” (2016). Paul agrees somewhat, admits that this is part of the reason she hasn’t moved. Yet it appears that it’s not simply continuity but stability that keeps her there. After a childhood spent in constant movement, from India to England then around the country, this apartment “has given me a sense of identity, which I struggled with, and I still struggle with.”

She discusses revisiting the experience of sitting for Lucian Freud (“excruciating”) for his painting “Naked Girl with Egg” (1980/81). Paul has re-painted this (“liberating”) as “Ghost of a Girl with an Egg” (2022), forcing us to look into the fearful eyes of her younger self via the hand of the only person who can truthfully lead us there: herself. Looking at it, I am reminded of how, in Self-Portrait, her diary entries from the time and her retrospective accounts merge to create a single voice, at once harmonious and evasive of being pinned to one interpretation of events. The affair falls into a chronically grey area, beginning when she was 18 and he was 55, a visiting tutor at The Slade, where she was studying. From this meeting was born a ten-year relationship and a son. Paul has long shunned the label of “muse”.

I hadn’t wanted to bring it up. I assumed she’d be tired of having to always discuss a relationship that ended decades ago, relegated to a shadow in a man’s life. But she began to talk about her vulnerability when she was young, coming to London as a naïve 16-year-old, exposed to “the predatory nature of a lot of men.” Her attitude strikes me as different to that of Self-Portrait, less apologetic of him. She explains this by the fact that so much of that book comes from diary entries: “when you’re going through something yourself, you’re quite strong about it.” She acknowledges the contradictions present throughout it all, seems accustomed to them. How her religious family were disapproving but accepting. How her and Freud did love each other, but in a way that was “quite damaging.”

This is not to portray her as a victim though, something she adamantly refutes. “I don’t feel I am a victim, and I didn’t feel I was then. I carried on painting with strength and commitment throughout, and I still do. I think it’s quite a courageous thing to actually admit the fact that I love Lucian. I don’t need to turn him into a monster.” As she says, “anger is quite a simplistic emotion, really.”

This may be true, but she allows herself a certain amount of anger at the state of the world, the misogyny that she believes is “suddenly getting worse.” In response, her view of her role — as a woman, as an artist — has changed in recent years. “I can’t just keep my head down and keep painting. There are poisonous things out there that are just too toxic to let go.”

Though gentle and softly-spoken, careful to put me at ease, there is a radical strength beneath her calm and measured speech. She admits that her lifestyle, her lack of concern for her surroundings or appearance, “does challenge a certain sense of status.” Yet this isn’t slovenliness but a willed indifference to convention or performance.

In ‘Painting Myself’ she regrets that “A group of male painters is empowered by solidarity; the opposite is true for women.” I ask about this, and she talks about “the tendency to lump women artists together.” Yet, more interestingly, she reveals that she herself feels uncomfortable in the figurative company of other women artists. “I don’t know whether it’s because I come from a family with five sisters. I find my identity threatened by being in this family of women, being compared to one another.”

We’re interrupted by a knock on the door, her agent politely letting us know that we’d been talking for an hour and asking if we were done. I’d wanted to say that women artists don’t have to be either entirely cut off or placed in comparison to other women. That community can be formed, relationships can be fostered when this is done by the women themselves rather than imposed. It’s what Paul herself does when she builds a bridge across time to Gwen John, bypassing facile comparisons in their relations to men in favour of an artistic relationship. It’s what Anne Carson does with Emily Brontë in the poem recommended by Paul. And it’s what Paul does when she holds out her hand to women in general, tells her story through her painting and writing.

TILDA WALKER has a bad habit of taking photos of art to “look at later” (she doesn’t).

Art courtesy of Celia Paul