Celia Paul by Victoria Miro

Celia Paul

Victoria Miro

Celia at Home Hilton Als We met. He gave me a copy of Proust’s “On Reading” for my birthday and what followed was our first night of love. That night there was very little language and what language there was grew out of the various negotiations we—I—tried to insinuate in-between that which cannot be negotiated: emotional senselessness in the arms of love.

He belonged to someone else. He was almost twenty years older than myself. I’m not sure how much the latter point had to do with anything but the former did: being his mistress— not being with him completely, what a ridiculous notion, who among us belongs to anyone, let alone completely—was pre-ordained, genetically speaking: my father would not be with my mother in any way that might be called conventional or satisfying: she was like a bastard child looking for love from a phantom parent who could not acknowledge her for the usual reasons—fear and intimacy revulsion, followed by wave after wave of horror over the idea let alone the reality of being claimed—and so, in her rush to not say who she was or what she wanted, she tried to stop her own desire up by producing children—four bastard children with my father, who made sure my mother died feeling no less orphaned than she did when she was alive.

My father lived with another woman—his mother. They shared a house with my grandfather, my aunt, her husband, and their daughter. Also living in that house was one of my older

sisters—L. While she was still a child L had moved out of her mother’s house or would it be more accurate to say she had moved away from her mother and siblings while still a child to be my father’s wife. She wanted to be the only one, like Antigone, whose name translates, roughly, as “in place of mother.” L, like Antigone, would lead her blind father through the world and into a kind of emotional sight, he would see her because of her constant presence and she would be his only love and if I am lying may God strike me blind and so then I’d no longer see Celia Paul’s paintings that are set, more often than not, in rooms I have known, rooms crowded with emotional negotiation, not only between subject and portraitist but the truth of being and the fake of being, too—our Blakeian self that pours the tea, smiling sweetly, like so much tea sweetener, eyes downcast, the very image of modesty, as that other, sometimes “truer” self laces the brew with strychnine and veracity.

My sister, L, smiling sweetly, twenty years after she’d left her mother to become her father’s wife (she would not be a bastard as her mother was a bastard, as her siblings were bastards) stood at the sink in her mother’s house one afternoon and our mother or should I say my mother and L’s rival said: I have always wanted to ask you—why did you move out? And L said: I wanted to look after X [my father’s sister’s daughter]. I wanted to be a good mother, like you! And because my mother was a woman of few words, since words are attached to who you are, or might be, and who in the world had made room for her to do that, she said nothing, and I swear this is a story my sister or shall I say my father’s only wife tells about our mother or rather my mother without realising she’s nowhere near the truth in terms of her motives and my mother had a hand in that. My mother allowed L to move out and into my father’s house because she could not say, for herself, to my father, I am moving in, I want you to look at me, and love me. Instead, she offered a living symbol of their love up, the third of their girls (her first two were with another man, my father’s former best friend) and may God strike me blind if I do not say that the memory of this and how it all connected to my legs tangling up in the thicket of his legs the evening after

he gave me Proust’s “On Reading” are connected in ways that are only clear to me now, and may God strike me blind if it’s not true that I began to see this a number of years ago, in Berlin, when I spent time with a Celia Paul painting, it was large and grey, in any case, grey was the dominant colour and Paul’s grey was like no other I had ever seen, it was the way memories are grey, especially when you squint your mind’s eye and a memory becomes misremembered—grey like that; in any case a painting’s frame is always a kind of room— there was a seated figure, a woman, and she was rendered in a darker hue than the rest of the painting, there was a certain Manet-esque darkness to the form, but that is only if you are looking superficially, Paul’s darker hues are more true than Manet’s because they were being disciplined out of her subconscious, not a rendering or illustrative of anything but what Paul could and could not see at first glance or after many glances of a woman’s face; sometimes it’s one of her sister’s, or her mother’s. Let me see if I can be more specific. Sometimes, when you look at a painting by Celia Paul, your eye is drawn to the humans in her paintings first because it’s what we all do—look for ourselves in anything. We’re the centre of the world, right? No trees fall in the forest if we don’t see them fall, right? In any case, something happens to you or should happen to you after you get over looking for yourself in a painting by Celia Paul—you feel what philosophers and scholars of the ancient world and plain old ordinary people might call the soul. Paul’s conversations are a conversation about the soul. I don’t know how to define what a soul is, or should be, except to say when I think of it I see the curve of my mother’s shoulders bending over the sink of her wanting, wanting her daughter to love her and her father and wanting to be loved herself. Is the soul that which is shaped by need or a similar desire or is it our very being? That’s what I saw in Celia Paul’s painting, the soul emerging out of the carefully rendered lives and lines in her work that always look like the day emerging from the night. And may God strike me down blind if what I have told you about his legs and Proust, the two women standing at the sink, the living embodiment of soul, would not have occurred to me had I not seen, following that grey painting or was it before, a very small painting by Paul at a

critic’s house in London, I think it was before I saw the grey painting for sure, and I was so drawn to it, it sat on my friend’s side table like a brilliant memory of a face, something lit from within and, upon closer inspection, open to doubt because it was a picture of that which causes the most doubt in the mind’s eye: a face; we see ourselves in each and every one of them and not ourselves, too, there’s that Blakeian split again, always and forever. The small Paul face was of a woman, and Paul’s painting didn’t really send me back in time into specific memories so much as I longed to understand what connected me to that (presumably) white female face and how it resonated not just with mine, but in the larger world. I knew nothing about Paul when I saw that painting, did not know that she was born in India, and was one of five daughters, and that her father was, at one point, the Bishop of Bradford, but was I surprised to read in one of her infrequent interviews that she was deeply attached to her mother and that when a younger sister was born she felt herself to be invisible, and that when she was recruited to study at the Slade at a very young age she couldn’t relate to the models they provided, she didn’t know them, so, she’d return home to her mother and paint what she knew: her mother, that other woman’s face that contains aspects of her face and history. And let God strike me down blind if I didn’t know all of that when I began to sit in front of Paul’s various sitters, looking at their faces not in the way she did, of course, but because I have a face, too, and wondered what it looked like to be looked after by Paul who saw the family of man in her sisters, her Mum, the atmosphere of family with all its recriminations and regrets and forgiveness, a universe of feeling and thought that can happen in the smallest of largest of rooms; and there was the specificity of her address as well—This is who I am, an artist; This is who I am, an artist, in relationship to these other people and myself—which also connected me to the face she had painted— and I wondered what the psychic toll of that might be on Paul’s face and body, absorbing the atmosphere of someone else’s soul, it’s bound to show on your face, in your love, and so I looked—shyly, at first, probably because I wasn’t sure I would or could take all of Paul’s feelings—at her self-portraits, some of them emerging out of a yellow field, and I looked at

the close up self-portraits, her dark and graying straight hair tucked behind her ear, and let God strike me blind if I did not have to look away at times, just as I had to look away, too, at a picture of her sisters, older now, dressed in white smocks, paint dripping down from where they sat, real figments from a fact-based imagination, Paul herself in the background of the piece, a part of and not a part of the parade of paint, of women.

Paul works from the inside out; she spends a considerable amount of time in the soul of her subjects even before she raises her brush; most writers work this way, seemingly not doing anything at all at first, listening to people chat amiably, having a drink, and so on, and then something happens, the work happens, and let God strike me blind if what makes Paul’s work so different is that when it comes to the work, painting qua painting, you don’t find it’s meaning in other artists; you could very well say well there’s a little Giacometti drawingishness going on here, and a little something or other there, but if you look at Giacometti closely you will see that his drawings and his paintings are interesting in their denial of feeling because of his focus on planes—the lines that made a face instead of what was behind the face. Celia Paul’s palette starts behind the face—the mirror face or the friend face that we make to get by, our not true self. For Paul this would not do. She is ruthless because she wants our true self and nothing less, how dare she, what power and what hubris, but there she is. There would be no art without her insistence, her demand for the truth of the stories her paintings tell, it’s funny, looking at Paul’s work I don’t see any other artist at all, but I see a tradition—an English tradition of family as the penultimate subject, and it’s always been there in modernist novels, ranging form Virginia Woolf to Edward St. Aubyn, but now it’s there in Celia Paul and did I say that my family is from Barbados, and that the eccentricity of my family’s form might be English-based and that’s what I mean to say: after I found his legs after I read Proust for the first time, and then understood my sister and my mother trying not to be orphaned, I realised Celia Paul, in her work, had been everywhere I’ve talked about here, long before I could talk about it.

Kate by the Window, 2013 Oil on canvas 142.6 x 142.6 x 3.5 cm 56 1/8 x 56 1/8 x 1 3/8 in

Two Sisters (Kate and Jane), 2013 Watercolour and pastel on paper laid on canvas 143 x 142.6 x 3 cm 56 1/4 x 56 1/8 x 1 1/8 in

Kate in White, 2014 Oil on canvas 127 x 127 x 3.5 cm 50 x 50 x 1 3/8 in detail opposite first page

Kate in White, 2013 Watercolour and pastel on paper 101.6 x 66 cm 40 x 26 in

Annela 3, 2013 Oil on canvas 142.2 x 107 x 3.5 cm 56 x 42 1/8 x 1 3/8 in

Gillian, 2013 Watercolour on paper 101.6 x 66 cm 40 x 26 in

Self-Portrait in a Narrow Mirror, 2013-2014 Oil on canvas 127.5 x 63.5 x 3.5 cm 50 1/4 x 25 x 1 3/8 in

Juliette, February, 2014 Oil on canvas 63.5 x 56 x 2 cm 25 x 22 1/8 x 3/4 in

Juliette, 2013 Watercolour on paper 101.6 x 66 cm 40 x 26 in

Steve Seated, 2014 Oil on canvas 63.5 x 56 x 2 cm 25 x 22 1/8 x 3/4 in

Steve, 2013 Watercolour and pastel on paper 101.6 x 66 cm 40 x 26 in

Self-Portrait, June, 2013 Oil on canvas 56 x 63.5 x 2 cm 22 1/8 x 25 x 3/4 in

Self-Portrait, July, 2013 Oil on canvas 56 x 63.5 x 2 cm 22 1/8 x 25 x 3/4 in

Self-Portrait, 2013 Watercolour on paper 101.6 x 66 cm 40 x 26 in detail opposite last page

Self-Portrait, August, 2013 Oil on canvas 56 x 63.5 x 2 cm 22 1/8 x 25 x 3/4 in

Self-Portrait, September, 2013 Oil on canvas 56 x 63.5 x 2 cm 22 1/8 x 25 x 3/4 in

Self-Portrait, October, 2013 Oil on canvas 56 x 63.5 x 2 cm 22 1/8 x 25 x 3/4 in

British Museum Through My Window, 2013 Oil on canvas 102 x 106.5 x 3.5 cm 40 1/8 x 41 7/8 x 1 3/8 in

British Museum and Plane Tree, February, 2013 Oil on canvas 30.2 x 25.4 x 2 cm 11 7/8 x 10 x 3/4 in

Post-Office Tower, 2013 Oil on canvas 35.3 x 17.7 x 2 cm 13 7/8 x 7 x 3/4 in

Figure Approaching the British Museum, 2013 Oil on canvas 25.4 x 30.2 x 2 cm 10 x 11 7/8 x 3/4 in

St Georgeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Bloomsbury, Early Morning, 2013 Oil on canvas 30.5 x 25.4 x 2 cm 12 1/8 x 10 x 3/4 in

Looking South, Moonlight, 2013 Oil on canvas 25.4 x 30.2 x 2 cm 10 x 11 7/8 x 3/4 in

View From Lee Abbey, 2014 Oil on canvas 17.7 x 35 x 2 cm 7 x 13 3/4 x 3/4 in

Waves Breaking on Lee Abbey Beach, 2014 Oil on canvas 41 x 56 x 3.5 cm 16 1/8 x 22 1/8 x 1 3/8 in detail front endpaper

Plane Tree Shadow on my Wall, 2013 Oil on canvas 35.2 x 17.8 x 2 cm 13 7/8 x 7 1/8 x 3/4 in

Plane Tree, Great Russell Street, 2013 Oil on canvas 30.5 x 25.4 x 2 cm 12 1/8 x 10 x 3/4 in detail back endpaper

My Window, 2013 Oil on canvas 30.5 x 25.5 x 2 cm 12 1/8 x 10 1/8 x 3/4 in

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Celia Paul 12 June - 2 August 2014 Victoria Miro Gallery II · 16 Wharf Road · London N1 7RW

Essay by Hilton Als Design by Martin Lovelock Photography by Stephen White Celia Paul portrait © Francis Ware Edited by Martyn Richard Coppell

Printed and bound by PUSH

All images courtesy Celia Paul & Victoria Miro, London

Published by Victoria Miro 2014 ISBN 978 0 9927092 2 8

Copyright © The Victoria Miro Gallery All rights reserved. No part of this book should be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording or information storage or retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher

Victoria Miro