Celia Paul

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Celia Paul (born 1959) is a painter born in India although she is a British citizen.

Biography

Celia Paul was born in 1959 in the city of Thiruvananthapuram (formerly called Trivandrum), the state capital of Kerala in India. She studied at the Slade School of Art from 1976 to 1981, where she was taught by Lucian Freud, becoming his model for several works including Naked Girl with Egg (1981), now in the collection of the British Council.[1] In 1984,[citation needed] Paul had a child by Freud, named Frank Paul, who is also an artist.[2]

Celia Paul's first solo exhibition was at the Bernard Jacobson Gallery in London in 1986,[citation needed] and this was followed by further solo shows at Marlborough Fine Art, London, between 1991 and 2011. Other solo exhibitions have taken place in Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, in 2002 and again in 2003, and at Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, where she held a retrospective show in 2004. She showed at the Graves Art Sheffield in 2005. Paul is a regular exhibitor in the Royal Academy Summer Show and she was awarded the Sunny Dupree Award for her entry in 2013. [3] In 2010 she took part in the group exhibition 'Self-Consciousness' curated by Peter Doig and Hilton Als at the VeneKlasen/Werner, Berlin, which explored the idea of the portrait. Prior to that group shows have included: The School of London: Works on Paper' at the Odette Gilbert Gallery, London in 1989; 'British Figurative Art: Sickert to Bacon' at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, in 1989; the Contemporary Art Society Market at the Royal Festival Hall, London, in 1994; 'The School of London – from Bacon to Bevan', which toured to the Kunsthaus, Vienna, Auditorio de Galicia, Santiago de Compostela and the Musée Maillol, Paris, in 1998-1999; the Galerie de Bellefeuille, Montreal in 2005; Northumbria University Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne in 2010; and De Queeste, Brussels and Abeley-Watou, Flanders, also in 2010. Celia Paul exhibited her work with paintings by Gwen John, 'Gwen John and Celia Paul: Painters in Parallel' at Pallant House in Chichester 2012-2013 and an exhibition of her own paintings 'Separation' at Chichester Cathedral. Her self-portrait 'Painter and Model' was included in 'Cinematic Visions: Painting at the Edge of Reality',curated by James Franco, Isaac Julien and Glenn Scott Wright, at the Victoria Miro Gallery in 2013. Her watercolour Self-Portrait was included in the exhibition 'Arcimboldo to Kitaj' at the British Museum 2013.

She has work in the collections of Abbot Hall Art Gallery and Museum, Kendal; British Museum; Carlsberg Foundation, Copenhagen; Charlottenborg Museum, Copenhagen; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Frissiras Museum, Athens; Metropolitan Museum, New York; National Portrait Gallery, London; Herzog Ulrich Gallery, Brunswick, Germany; the Ruth Borchard Collection; New Hall, Cambridge; Saatchi Collection, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut.[citation needed] Paul has been a regular exhibitor at the annual Corner exhibition in Copenhagen since 2003 and in 2011 she won first prize in the Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Award.

Paul was the subject of a review by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 2004. Writing in Modern Painters magazine, the Archbishop Rowan Williams (who is married to her older sister Jane) stated: 'The whole point of Celia Paul's work is to break down the polarity between self-contemplation and the contemplation of the other - an other that opens out to that final otherness which religious people know as God.'[4]

Celia Paul is represented by Marlborough Fine Art, London.

Celia Paul has a son (from her relationship with Lucian Freud between 1978 and 1988), Frank, born 1984.[5]

Style and Influences

Celia Paul only works from people she knows intimately: sisters, self, close friends. From 1977-2007 she worked on a series of portraits of her mother. [6] Paul took up this subject whilst still a student at the Slade School of Art, and she has described the motivation to use her mother as a principal subject as stemming from an inability to draw the Slade School's life model because she felt no connection with the model. Paul said: “She [the model] meant nothing to me, so I couldn’t work from her. It seemed important to me to work from someone who mattered to me. And the person who mattered most to me was my mother.”[7] As a result Paul's mother became a recurring subject of her paintings and prints for the next 35 years. Writing in Modern Painters magazine in 1991 Martin Golding described the intimacy of Paul's work as leading to an "emotional intensity" deriving from her "unique engagement with their subjects.”[8] A similar comment was also made by the art critic Laura Cuming, who said of Paul's work: 'Her paintings aren't so much portraits as poems, based on intensely empathetic observation.'[9]

Paul's style and method has been compared favourably to that of Francis Bacon (artist), Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, although she has also been contrasted to them for possessing an 'overtly spiritual dimension' to her work.[10]

Paul's painted portraits are loose brush realist in style, with shallow space and little additional detailing. Paul's monochrome prints are similar in format, sometimes resembling the prints of the German expressionist artist Käthe Kollwitz. The images are built up through what one critic described as 'a gradual accumulation of oil-paint, sometimes smoothly trans-lucent, sometimes roughly scumbled or pierced.' The result is, according to the same critic, that 'Magnified, the surface would be as irregular as the moon's crust. At a distance, it gathers and reflects back a hazy brightness.'[11]

Occasionally Paul has also produced images of landscapes, including images of London's Post Office Tower and other scenes with buildings. In each case there is a great deal of dynamism in the way the paint is manipulated, with Matthew Collings describing the process as one in which "Paint is piled up, scraped down, reworked, moved around and ordinary things, bodies and effects of light are conjured."[12] In relation to her figure paintings Alistair Hicks has written that "Large figures dominate large compositions and they deserve the much vaunted epithet of monumental. (Celia Paul's) heavy technique creates her sitters before our very eyes. One can see them built up brush stroke upon brush stroke."[13] According to the art critic Tony Godfrey, Paul works within the Slade tradition,[14] a reference to the emphasis on strong draughtsmanship in both the paintings and prints.

References

  1. ↑ William Feaver, Lucian Freud (New York: Rizzoli, 2007) p.39
  2. ↑ John Cornwell, 'Face to face with Freud' in The Sunday Times, 22 May 2005
  3. ↑ Laura Cumming, 'Fewer irises, but still too many gondolas', in The Observer (London newspaper), 4 June 2000
  4. ↑ Rowan Williams, 'Celia Paul: Darkness into Light', in Modern Painters, summer 2004; also cited in David Lister, 'The Week in Arts: So where is the real art of provocation?' in The Independent (London newspaper), 26 June 2004
  5. ↑ http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/oct/13/celia-paul-lucian-freud-son?INTCMP=SRCH#
  6. ↑ Michael Podro, 'In the still centre of the form', in The Times Literary Supplement, 11 June 2004, p.18
  7. ↑ Matilda Battersby, 'Celia Paul: Mothers and daughters', The Independent (London), 25 January 2011
  8. ↑ Martin Golding, Modern Painters, Autumn 1991
  9. ↑ Laura Cumming, 'Every daub has its day', in The Observer (London newspaper), 21 November 1999, Review section, page 11.
  10. ↑ Michael Glover, 'Art that Asks the Big Questions', in The Independent (London newspaper), 11 June 2004, p.28
  11. ↑ Laura Cumming, 'Every daub has its day', in The Observer (London newspaper), 21 November 1999, Review section, page 11.
  12. ↑ Matthew Collings, City Limits, October 1991
  13. ↑ Alistair Hicks, Antique & New Art, Autumn 1991
  14. ↑ Tony Godfrey, 'Exhibition Reviews' in The Burlington Magazine, vol. 128, No. 1004, November, 1986, p.845

Further reading

  • Catherine Lampert, Celia Paul (London: Marlborough Fine Art, 2011)
  • William Feaver (introduction), Celia Paul: Stillness (Kendal: Abbot Hall Art Gallery, 2004)
  • Sandy Nairn, The Portrait Now (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2006)
  • Edward King, Hannah Neale and Frances Snowden, Masters of British Art at Abbot Hall: Collecting the Past, Present and Future (Kendal: Lakeland Arts Trust, 2007)
  • Alistair Hicks, The School of London: Resurgence of Contemporary Painting (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1989)

External links

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