In our frantic, screen-obsessed culture, it is refreshing to gaze at paintings that are still. We have Morandi and Vermeer, masters of quiet stillness, but the art made today tends towards a flotilla of wild color and exuberant gesture. Yet, we do have the British artist Celia Paul, who paints portraits, a chair, one bed, the sea, a window, the tree out her window, a building out the same window and herself, still and quiet. These are not still lifes; they are subjects imbued with an inner life as if the subjects were not quite in this world or of this world. Except for works in more recent years, her palette has been subdued and dark.
Paul has been living and painting in the same flat for the last 43 years, painting the same chair and bed, the same window, painting in paint-coated smocks, on the same wooden, paint-flecked floorboards. She paints what she knows: herself, her mother and sisters, the tree and buildings out her window. None of her human subjects are smiling. It is not as if they are sad or angry, but rather a reflection of the artist’s state of mind in the act of painting them. She is deeply focused, delving inward as if mining the soul. This cannot be easy, finding such an elusive essence; yet somehow, in all her paintings, even the chair and the bed, there is this ephemeral, hovering essence.
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Mack Books has just published her monograph: Celia Paul: Works 1975–2025. It clocks in at 544 pages, displaying nearly 300 works, mostly paintings, with essays by Clare Carlisle, Hilton Als, Rowan Williams, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Paul and Edmund de Waal in conversation with Katy Hessel, along with an essay by Paul herself. It is rare to have a monograph published for a living artist and to include such uniquely dissimilar essays would be an immense honor for anyone. As Als writes in his essay, “She is everywhere in the pictures, in all those waves of consciousness that let themselves be known in paint. Wave after wave, controlled by the artist’s hand, and the sense of scale and narrative. A story that needs telling, even as some of it, or especially some of it, drips down like tears.” He calls the painting My Sisters in Mourning from 2015 a masterpiece.
The monograph begins with work Paul made when she was fifteen and moves chronologically through six decades to her most recent work at her current age of 65. We start with a woodcut, Sunflower Heads (1975) and travel through time until her most recent oil on canvas, The Sea, the Sea (2024). Over five decades, Paul most often painted her mother and one of her four sisters, Kate. The paintings of her mother are some of the most tender and endearing. She appears small, often with clasped hands, her swollen feet bare, sometimes sitting or lying down. She, too, has an inward, contemplative look on her face. Paul, in her book Self-Portrait from 2019, wrote that when her mother sat for portraits, “She used the time of silence for prayer: ‘What a gift for a Christian,’ she said.” In the paintings of Kate, her sister is most often looking down and to her right. Her focus, too, is inward, though not aloof. She appears vulnerable, exposed and also tender, like her mother. The paintings of Paul’s late husband, Steve, are among the most loving.
In 2024, I talked with Paul about many things. When I asked about painting her mother, she told me that she misses her every day. “She died in 2015. For thirty years, from 1977 to 2007, she sat for me twice a week. The act of sitting was an act of devotion. She wasn’t interested in the outcome, she was ‘there’ for me. I think prayer is the equivalent of this form of attention, of being present, being ‘there.’ In this sense, I pray, especially when I paint because my attention is what will give the painting a chance of having a life of its own. Every artist wants to create a work of art that has a life of its own, separate from its maker.”
In Paul’s seascapes, the rhythmic movement of the waves is meditative. There are no storms, only a pulsing presence that also feels soulful. Clare Carlisle, in her essay in the monograph, “My Mother and the Sea,” writes: “From 2015, Paul’s seascapes are as numerous as her self-portraits, and share their intimate, devotional, searching quality.” About Paul’s soft ground etching, My Mother and the Sea (1999), she wrote: “Eloquent as it is elemental… existential… beautiful in its simplicity.”
For Paul, the sea is a symbol of stillness and movement. “Thinking about water and waves, my inner weather can find a resonance–the water constantly shifting, always in flux, yet contained, controlled,” she told me. She also paints flowers: Narcissi, White Roses, Peace Lilies, Hyacinths, all painted in 2021 and all white flowers. “My flower paintings are almost always about renewal. I love all flowers, but I think my favorites might be roses and peonies. I love the infolding, the lushness combined with discreteness, in both these flowers. And, of course, they each have a heavenly scent. I want to try and convey their exquisite perfume by conjuring it up with my paint-marks.”
In the monograph, Paul writes that the “main danger of painting self-portraits is, of course, the possibility of becoming a narcissist: to be so obsessed by one’s own physique and inner thoughts that the outer world and other people have no relevance except as they relate to oneself.” As she paints herself, she is scrutinizing the image. From her 1983 self-portrait through to the most recent in 2024, the scrutiny becomes softer, more gentle and open. Experience, aging and understanding are revealed. From 2021 to the last painting in the book, her palette lightens with more blue, yellow and white. “I want the self-portraits I make from now on to convey a different sort of security. My recent self-portraits, which I am pleased with, owe their success to the power of defiance. ‘I am a survivor,’ they are clearly saying. I am self-enclosed, as if the paint were my armor.” And yet, the paintings feel lighter, more accessible, easier.
Proust is Paul’s favorite writer, “for the beauty, the humor, the vulnerability, the love, the yearning.” Proust often wrote about time and memory, and you can see the same in Paul’s paintings, how aligned they are with interiority as well as scrutiny of the outside world. In Lydia Davis’s introduction of her excellent translation of Swann’s Way, she wrote: “…the importance of the role of the artist in transforming reality according to a particular inner vison: the artist escapes the tyranny of time through art.”
For 10 years, Paul was in a relationship with the painter Lucian Freud, who bought her the flat in which she lives and works. He, in turn, was friends with Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews—the so-called School of London. Paul painted the four men in Colony of Ghosts (2023): “They represent home to me because I belong to them, even if they can’t let me in.” She was 18 when she and Freud became lovers, which they were until she was 28. Nearly four decades later, she writes: “All four men are now dead; they inhabit a different dimension.”
In Swann’s Way, Proust wrote: “All these memories added to one another now formed a single mass, but one could still distinguish between them–between the oldest, and those that were more recent, born of a fragrance, and then those that were only memories belonging to another person from whom I had learned them–if not fissures, if not true faults, at least that veining, that variegation of coloring, which in certain rocks, in certain marbles, reveal differences in origin, in age, in ‘formation.’”
Last year, Paul told me there wouldn’t be any photographs in her monograph. “I have been photographed too often. Photographs distract from the paintings. In photographs, I again become the model, not the artist.”
Paul’s variegation of color veining through her paintings has moved from heavy to light. She has indeed stepped out from behind her “armor of paint,” she writes, “and vulnerably engaging with myself and with my past, I might try to paint compassionate self-portraits which communicate a sense of peace to the people who look at them.” In her 2023 portrait, Painter Seated in her Studio, she is wearing her perennial paint-splattered smock, but this time it is a pale pink rose, as are the background, slippers and her skin. She seems rooted within the natural grace of a woman, looking out—a strong yet soft face. It is her hands that offer her soul–still, silent, at peace. A deeply moving work.
“Colony of Ghosts” is at Victoria Miro through April 17, 2025. “CELIA PAUL: DIARIES” is at the Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert Gallery through May 2, 2025.
