Celia Paul: Colony of Ghosts* and Celia Paul: Diaries**

Two concurrent solo exhibitions paint a much broader portrait of the artist Celia Paul, debunking the myth of her as a recluse and showing us some of who and what went into making her her

Celia Paul, Reclining Painter, 2023. Oil on canvas, 121.9 x 182.9 cm (48 x 72 in). © Celia Paul. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.

Victoria Miro, London*
14 March – 17 April 2025
Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, London**
21 March – 2 May 2025

by ANNA McNAY

There is something incredibly spiritual about Celia Paul’s paintings, and this is magnified in her exhibitions, such that entering the gallery is almost like entering a cathedral. This feeling is in part engendered by the glowing haloes and luminescent auras around so many of her subjects, and the sense of omnipotence in her seascapes and “portraits” of trees and flowers, and in part by the absent presence of the artist herself, regardless of whether or not the image is a self-portrait.

Paul was brought up in a deeply religious environment, her father being the leader of a religious community on the north Devon coast and latterly Bishop of Bradford. She describes religion as being “in my blood”.¹ Her mother – her most frequent sitter, until Paul’s youngest sister, Kate, took over, when Pamela Paul was no longer able to climb the 80 steps to Celia’s studio (in her flat opposite the British Museum, bought for her in the early 1980s by her then lover, Lucian Freud) – was also devout. In her memoir, Self-Portrait (2019), Paul writes: “My mother had an instinct for what it takes to be a great sitter, from the start. It became her ‘vocation’. She often used the time for prayer.”²

Celia Paul, My Mother and God, 1990. Oil on canvas, 167.3 x 91.4 cm (65 7/8 x 36 in). © Celia Paul. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.

This comes across in Paul’s portraits, including the somewhat atypical My Mother and God (1990), which hangs, incredibly dark, in a room filled with paintings of light and evanescence, in Paul’s eighth solo exhibition at Victoria Miro. Much of Paul’s work involves a struggle between light and dark, and while a lot of her early work was quite dark, light has started to appear more frequently. “But the light seems to be coming out of darkness. It’s not light on light,” she clarifies.³ My Mother and God comprises 167.3cm of dark canvas stretched upwards from the still image of her sitting mother praying. “Those prayers,” says a reviewer of a previous exhibition at the gallery, “call forth the thin band of yellow light entering the space at the apex, apotheosis and apogee of the canvas.”⁴ The dark empty space signifies the silence of God, while the light suggests his presence.⁵ Paul says: “I think that the central thing for [my mother] is her faith, so that to do a full deep portrait of her, I want that to be included.”⁶ This is, in fact, as much a portrait of faith as it is of her mother.

Celia Paul, Colony of Ghosts, 2023. Oil on canvas, 121.9 x 182.9 cm (48 x 72 in). © Celia Paul. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.

This painting is one of 18 in the exhibition, which is entitled Colony of Ghosts – underlining what I have already said about absent presences (or should that be present absences?) Paul notes: “[A] lot of the paintings of nature are to do with connecting to absent presences in a way.”⁷ The title is taken from another of the works, depicting Freud, Francis Bacon, Michael Andrews and Frank Auerbach, and inspired by John Deakin’s well-known photograph of the School of London painters lunching together in Wheeler’s restaurant in Soho in 1963. The title plays on their other popular haunt, the Colony Room. It is partly a homage, partly an examination of Paul’s residual anxiety around acceptance into this male club: “They represent ‘home’ to me because I belong among them, even if they can’t let me in,”⁸ she says. The painting shows Paul as a product of her milieu, not just of Freud. For example, we see here how she uses thick passages of paint, squeezed directly on to the canvas, like Auerbach (to whom she was close enough that she named her son – with Freud – after him). In the luscious and exhaustive new monograph, published by MACK, Paul says: “I often feel like a ghost myself … [M]y memories are more alive than my present existence,” and, by channelling them into her paintings, Paul preserves these memories in the eternal present of the painted image, adding: “[P]aint lives in the present tense, always.”⁹

Opposite this picture of the old boys’ club members hangs a portrait of the artist, reclining on a chaise longue (one of the few objects in her sparsely furnished studio), wearing her much-splattered painting smock (which she describes in her memoir as an “encrusted rock formation”¹⁰). Titled Reclining Painter (2023), it was designed deliberately as a companion piece for Colony of Ghosts, and, as is the colour scheme for the mainstay of the works in the exhibition, Paul paints herself in teal, plum and off-cream. “I want the self-portraits I make to convey a sort of security, to transform the reflected ‘she’ in the mirror into the real ‘I’,”¹¹ she says, but she also clarifies: “I’m not a portrait painter. If I’m anything, I’ve always been an autobiographer and a chronicler of my life and family. I have told my life in images.”¹² The contemporary painter Susie Hamilton speaks of a list of “abuses” that she carries out on her works – including pouring Fairy washing-up liquid or coffee on to the surface, tearing, staining and blotting – and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear Paul, certainly in this work, confess to something similar, so varied is her mark-making.

Celia Paul, Ghost of a Girl with an Egg, 2022. Installation view, Celia Paul: Colony of Ghosts, Victoria Miro, London, 14 March–17 April 2025. © Celia Paul. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.

One of the most compelling works in the exhibition is Ghost of a Girl with an Egg (2022), an homage – or perhaps more authentic counterpart – to Freud’s Naked Girl with Egg (1980-81). Paul describes the experience of modelling for this painting: “I was very self-conscious, and the positions I assumed for him were awkward and uncharacteristic of the way I usually lay down. I was never naked normally. I always wore something, even when I was alone. The experience of being naked disarmed me. I felt like I was at the doctor’s, or in hospital, or in the morgue. ... Lucian placed the easel near the bed. He stood very close to me and peered down at me. I was very conscious of my flesh, and I felt myself to be undesirable. Lucian instructed me to move about a bit on the bed. He told me to relax. I put my hand up to my face and cupped the other hand under my full breast. ‘That's it!’ he said. I knew that it was the way the skin of my breast rumpled under the touch of my hand that had attracted him. ... When he came to painting my breasts, I felt his scrutiny intensify. I felt exposed and hated the feeling. I cried throughout these sessions. ... When I thought he had nearly completed the painting, he decided that he needed to place something in the foreground, so that the perspective of the nude would be more dramatic and intimate. He told me that my breasts reminded him of eggs. He boiled an egg and cut it in half and placed it on a white dish, which he positioned on the high stool that he used to put his turps-holder on. He made me lie in ‘my’ position while he painted the eggs in the dish in front of me.”¹³ In her painting, Paul’s body is very white. She has “turned a meaty representation of flesh into a haunting and spiritual one”.¹⁴ In the piercing flash of the two black dots representing her pupils, we see Paul’s gaze observing Freud’s gaze on her.¹⁵

Paul writes of crying while being painted – or, perhaps more accurately, as the trigger, stared at naked – and tears run as a thread between the paintings on display here. In Weeping Muse (2024), they gush down the canvas, and in Weeping Muse and Running Tap (2024), they are echoed by this second watery flow. This small image, painted in a different colour scheme from the others in the upper gallery, is based on Freud’s Large Interior W11 (After Watteau) (1981-83), depicting Paul with one of Freud’s previous lovers, her child, and one of his children. Paul’s version retains just her own image (erasing the other three), but she has cried so much that her feet are seemingly submerged in water. The reference to the casual (mis)treatment by Freud is as clear here as anywhere.

Celia Paul, The Sea, The Sea, 2024. Oil on canvas, 166 x 198.5 cm (65 3/8 x 78 1/8 in). © Celia Paul. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.

Nature, too, is shown to weep. Sunlight on Weeping Birch (2023) has a mixture of turps and paint running down the canvas, while Force (2024), reclaiming the flow powerfully for itself, again exemplifies Paul’s squeezing of paint directly from the tube and her manipulation of pigment and mark-making in many different ways: with a sponge, with the end of the brush, with a palette knife, etc. Another recurrent Paul motif is that of the sea, which she began painting when her mother was dying in 2015. “Somehow her death made me feel particularly connected to nature, because if she’s anywhere, she’s there,” Paul said in an interview.¹⁶ “Forms broke up. Nothing seemed to be permanent.”¹⁷ Here, we have the large and dreamy seascape The Sea, The Sea (2024) – and nothing but the sea – except where it is the sky. The question is where one ends and the other begins.

My Sisters by the Sea (2023) is a silent elegy to her mother. Paul is close to her four sisters – Mandy, a priest; Lucy, a teacher and child counsellor; Jane, a theologian; and Kate, a writer – and has painted them together (and individually) more than once. Perhaps the most poignant painting of this sort is November 11th (2024), which is not included in the Victoria Miro exhibition, because it is hanging across town, in Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, as part of Diaries, a concurrent exhibition of Paul’s flower portraits and sketches. Paul painted this picture on her 65th birthday, which turned out also to be the day on which Auerbach died. She writes: “Ever since I had completed the big Family Group painting after my father died, I had been planning the painting that I would do after the death of my mother. I foresaw that the inconceivable pain of that eventuality should somehow be commemorated and transfigured. I wanted to do a painting the same size as Matisse’s Le Buisson, which measures 149cm x 149cm, because I have never seen a painting where the scale was so harmonious with the subject, and because I wanted to represent my sisters as being almost like a rose bush – each an individual bloom, yet united by the stem and roots of family history that they shared.”¹⁸ She goes on to explain how she needed them to all sit for her together to capture “the supernatural empathy that ran like an invisible skein between them,”¹⁹ and that she didn’t paint herself into the picture because she would have had to have shown herself in the mirror, which would have interfered with the image’s resonant stillness.²⁰ She also describes how she saw each sister, and how each sister experienced this sitting differently. “Mandy was sitting nearest to me, her profile haloed in the golden light from the window. In the painting her head is held high, and she seems to be navigating her way out of grief … Lucy is next to Mandy. Her face, half turned against the light, is in chiaroscuro. Her silver hair is lit up and her right eyelid and forehead are brightly illumined. She is looking down and is withdrawn into herself … Jane, a theologian, is placed between Lucy and Kate, and is in shadow. She appears aloof and quietly self-contained ... She was also worried by the fact that I hadn’t put myself into the painting, and she thought about the reason for my absence … Kate … is ‘there’ for me and her sisters. She appears to be actively thinking and caring about us.”²¹ Once again, light coming from darkness, and shadows capturing an absent presence. Jane’s wondering amounts to considering whether Celia’s absence from the picture reflects her own sense of loss and of something missing from the family dynamic. “I mean she’s clearly present,” she says, “because she’s the one making it and creating it, and interpreting it and translating it, but she herself is not going to be visible in the picture.”²² Yet another reference to the artist’s absent presence.

Celia Paul, Delphinium, February 14th, 2024. Watercolour and pastel on paper, 101.6 x 66 cm. © Celia Paul. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.

Like the painting of her sisters, the “portraits” of flowers are mostly titled with a date. Each of these dates bears significance for Paul – sometimes something that viewers will recognise and share in, as, for example, with her delicate Delphinium, February 14th (2024), marking Valentine’s Day, and Pink Rosebuds, New Year’s Day (2024). Others, however, keep their significance private, so that viewers may attach their own. An example of this is the poignant Everlasting Spring, Bunch of Dried Flowers, March (2024), which was made last year on Good Friday, the third anniversary of the death of Paul’s husband, Steven Kupfer. “The works on paper are records of occasions I need to remember,” she says. “In this respect they resemble diaries” (hence the title of the show).²³ To return to the sense of the galleries being like cathedrals, these flower portraits certainly have something devotional about them, standing alone, like medieval icons of saints. Furthermore, as Paul has said in an interview: “[Y]ou can’t help thinking [that flowers] may speak of joy and hope and transformation.”²⁴

Celia Paul, Self-Portrait, 2020. Pencil on paper, 15.2 x 15.2 cm. © Celia Paul. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.

Holland Hazlitt-Hibbert is also showcasing pages from Paul’s never-before-seen sketchbooks from 2011 to the present day. These are drawings in different mediums made when Paul has been on holiday. These frequently go on to serve as the basis for paintings. There are also several further larger works on paper (besides the flower portraits), made in her studio, which are works in their own right. Paul explains: “The paper is attached to a drawing board and placed on an easel so that the verticality of the image is accentuated by drips from the watercolour or ink. They have an openness and drama which contrast with the private intimacy of the studies I make on holiday which are prised from within the covers of my sketchbooks.”²⁵ One particularly resonant picture is Tower, Moon, British Museum (2021), showing the view from Paul’s studio window. In it, the BT Tower is both something alien and something completely recognisable, reminding me of the spectre of the television tower in Berlin, which, visible from nearly everywhere, for me is now metonymic with the city as a whole. Paul has “a particular kind of relation” with the BT Tower, because “in November and February on a very, very bright day, the sun catches the mirrors on the top of it and reflects the shadows of my plane tree on to the walls in my studio, which create this kind of quite miraculous … like a visitation on my studio wall. These patterns of the branches and the kind of shimmering leaves, it’s extremely magical and beautiful.”²⁶ The art critic William Feaver describes the tower as “a sort of lighthouse on the Bloomsbury skyline”,²⁷ but if that isn’t a description of a stained-glass window, I do not know what is. Paul describes the tower as “very lonely and remote” – like her, one might ask? Actually not, I would say, since, as the paintings in Victoria Miro’s exhibition show us the people and places who have made Paul Paul, so these works on paper and sketches at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert come together to colour this picture in and show us a much broader version of Paul – and she is quite apparently far more than just the melancholy recluse sitting in her studio making self-portraits.

References
1. A Conversation with Celia Paul, The Huntingdon, 29/04/19.
2. Self-Portrait by Celia Paul, Vintage, 2019, page 3.
3. The Huntingdon, op cit.
4. Review of Celia Paul at Victoria Miro in the Church Times by Jonathan Evens, 13/12/19.
5. Review of Celia Paul at Victoria Miro in Hackney Citizen by ER Ambler, 22/11/19.
6. Celia Paul by William Feaver in Celia Paul: Stillness Paintings, Works on Paper and Prints, Lakeland Arts Trust, 2004, page 4.
7. Interview between Celia Paul and the National Portrait Gallery curator, Flavia Frigeri, December 2021, page 5. My emphasis.
8. From the Victoria Miro website.
9. Celia Paul: Works 1975-2025, MACK, 2025, page 184.
10. Self-Portrait, op cit, page 196.
11. Painting Myself by Celia Paul in The New York Review of Books, 13/3/25.
12. Celia Paul: private view Taster 1 by Jake Auerbach, 17/07/21.
13. Self-Portrait, op cit, pages 96-97.
14. Celia Paul: Works 1975-2025, op cit, page 183.
15. Here, Now, There, Then by Karl Ove Knausgaard in ibid, page 502.
16. Frigeri, op cit, page 5.
17. The Huntingdon, op cit.
18. Self-Portrait, op cit, page 180.
19. ibid, page 181.
20. The Huntingdon, op cit.
21. Self-Portrait, op cit, pages 181-83.
22. ibid, page 183.
23. Essay by Celia Paul for the invitation to Celia Paul: Diaries, Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, March 2025.
24. Frigeri, op cit, page 5.
25. Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, op cit.
26. Frigeri, op cit, page 5.
27. Feaver, op cit, page 1.