Self-Portrait

A unique work of art and literature: a profound, intimate and deeply personal memoir told through words and images, by one of the most important British painters working today.

Captivating... Mesmerizing... Paul's powers of observation are keen and often ruthless.

A poetic, sometimes painfully honest memoir.

I loved the painter Celia Paul’s memoir Self-Portrait. It’s fascinating for its account of her long-term lover Lucian Freud (he emerges as the ultimate man-baby, by turns charismatic, needy and breathtakingly selfish), but it’s also painfully honest on what it means to be a woman who puts art first, no matter what.

The publication of this, her first book, is of great significance... Having recently returned to writing again, she has found a new confidence, in words, in herself and in her painting... No longer wanting to remain simply a part of Freud’s story, she wanted to make him part of her story, a narrative about her life as a painter. ... Paul’s memoir therefore seems fresh, and comes as a surprise.

A story of obsession and manipulation that sends our feelings on a rollercoaster... [Self-Portrait] turns into a sort of myth about the misuse of fame and the male ego, about the struggles faced by creative women, about the body in all its guises. Like a myth, it unfolds with confusions and contradictions, a terrible inevitability and many, many discomfiting truths.

In this fascinating memoir, you watch a woman being gradually eviscerated by love-torture. Illustrated with Celia Paul's paintings, it is partly a pitilessly honest re-living of that ten-year episode of her life, and partly a meditation on the eternal problem of how to juggle lovesickness and an artistic career. It's also an enthralling examination of female self-esteem: how it can be slowly destroyed and, eventually, rescued.

Paul is one of the most thoughtful and significant living women artists and Self-Portrait helps suggest why… Her painting and writing are of a piece — closely observed, not seeking to flatter, and with people always as her focus.

Beguiling… Self-Portrait illuminates how supremely difficult it is to make an artistic practice work alongside the demands of care-giving and home-making… The author draws on the rare reflective power she exhibits in her art, to communicate what, she found, painting could not.

Compelling... The story she relates through images and words has the feel of a painter’s parable, in which hardship, sacrifice and solitude lead, eventually, to something like grace... Paul is uninterested in making herself appear more palatable for the benefit of a reader. She accounts for her life like a person peeling off her bandages, often asking her audience to share in her experiences of difficulty and hurt.

Fascinating... Paul's paintings, interspersed throughout the book, are quite extraordinary - ambiguous and mystical... Her style is passionate [and] direct.

An impressive portrait of the artist as a young woman...candid, non-judgemental and illuminating.

[An] insightful, unflinchingly honest account, she [Celia Paul] describes her need for space to work and think, her emotionally tempestuous 10-year relationship with Lucian Freud.

Beautifully written, and thoughtful

A deeply affecting and lyrical self-portrait of the artist as a young woman, which quietly builds in strength and luminosity, culminating in a glorious state of serenity and self-knowledge.

An insight into the white knuckle determination needed to make great art, and why it is so few women painters reach the heights. An astoundingly honest book, moving and engrossing – full of truths.

Self-Portrait demonstrates a painter’s startling command of language and her moral power of seeing the world concretely and without subjectivity. Celia Paul’s account of the young woman artist’s struggle towards expression is a story that exposes some of the deepest wounds in our cultural psyche: the ambiguous power of the male artist, the vulnerability and isolation of the woman driven to create, the question of who owns her, of her very body and what it’s for. Written with beauty and candour but without anger, Self-Portrait will yet arouse indignation in its readers, for its delicate exposure of what occurs in the pursuit and misuse of artistic status.

Self-Portrait by Celia Paul is a valuable document. The precision and intimacy of her writing is as impressive as the empathy and power of her painting. I feel that this book will be important to many readers.

A wonderfully honest and thoughtful book, unburdened by anger or blame or the need to justify, even though it is conjuring up the presence of such a difficult and complicated man. The words make pictures in my head, just as the pictures make words.

I loved Celia Paul’s memoir. It reminded me what it felt like to be a very young painter – and also just very young.

I have been reading the wonderful autobiography Self-Portrait by Celia Paul, which recounts her early life as an artist and her relationship with Lucian Freud, with whom she spent ten years and had a son.

Celia’s writing, like her painting, is unflinchingly honest and utterly heart wrenching. This book charts how as an artist and a young woman, with the sensitivity of a butterfly and the ferocity of a lion, Celia Paul makes her way through these enthralling and bewildering formative years.

A depiction of difficult relationships between artists—fruitful and terrifying… [Self-Portrait] is important and necessary.

It’s a haunting companion piece to  William Weaver’s recent rumbustious  biography of Lucian Freud, Paul’s former lover. Freud’s personal life made Picasso’s seem a Victorian model of temperance and it’s interesting to reflect on the slack cut for great artists, so long as they were men.

Paul's memoir, Self-Portrait, is to me among the greatest ever books by an artist.

Celia Paul is recognised as one of the most important painters working in Britain today. She was born in India in 1959, before moving to England as a young child. Her major solo exhibitions include Celia Paul, curated by Hilton Als, at Yale Center for British Art (2018) and The Huntington (2019); Desdemona for Celia by Hilton, Gallery Met, New York (2015–16); and Gwen John and Celia Paul, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (2012–13). Her work was included in the group exhibition All Too Human at Tate Britain (2018), and is in many collections, including the British Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, Saatchi Collection and Metropolitan Museum, New York.

'Painfully honest on what it means to be a woman who puts art first, no matter what' Olivia Laing 
 
I'm not a portrait painter. If I'm anything, I have always been an autobiographer. 
 
In Self-Portrait, Celia Paul reveals a life truly lived through art. She moves effortlessly through time, in words and images, from her arrival at the Slade School of Fine Art at sixteen, through a profound and intense affair with the older and better-known artist Lucian Freud, to the practices of her present-day studio. This intimate memoir is, at its heart, about a young woman navigating the path to artistic freedom, with all the sacrifices and complications that entails. 
 
'Powerful' Zadie Smith 
'Engrossing' Vogue 
'Captivating... Mesmerising' New York Times 
 
**Shortlisted for the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize **

Celia Paul

Paul interweaves John's biography ... with accounts of her own life and lyrical readings of John's paintings ... summoning a version of the artist at her most imaginative and prolific.

At once diary and confessional, biography and autobiography and something between the two... This book lets the reader into a world of sadness, loneliness and isolation. At its heart, however, is that unexpected kernel of confidence and self-belief that the author shared with Gwen John.

Powerfully honest... Her voice is deceptively plain and her insights about her own art, as well as the choices she had to make as a woman, are both illuminating and full of courage... a beautiful book.

It is really Paul who's centre stage, and she is fascinating; I do not feel, at this point, that I could ever tire of her mind, and the unlikely, singular way it turns.

An excellent new book. . . . In a nod to the epistolary novel, she addresses her letters to 'Dear Gwen.' It's a risky conceit, but as the intimacy grows - if not with John, then certainly with us - their clarity on the grammars of gender is compelling, and utterly contemporary. Truthfulness does not run one way, any more than power and vulnerability do.

An utterly revelatory piece of art writing.

It's a work of biography, analysis, reverence, and supplication, and it's filled with buoyant representations of both Paul's and John's work. A charge runs through it, the crackly static electricity of two connected souls touching hands across a century.

Paul's prose is spare and luminous, revealing her painter's eye in attention to colour, texture, and depth... The included paintings, both John's and Paul's, are breathtaking. Fellow artists will relish this lucid look at what is required to "live and paint truthfully."

Remarkable dialectics of loneliness and desire, of love and manipulation, that Paul handles with patient - even disarming - frankness... Alongside the imaginative biography of John, and alongside the dated journal entries, the book is also a foray into Paul's past. The effect is one of a dreamscape, a mesh of past and present, as the borders between the two female artists soften and start to give.

Celia Paul, in both her painting and her writing, is a formidable guardian of her own inner life, as well as a careful chronicler of what it means to traverse a boundary that is barely perceptible, hardly there at all, and yet is the place where truth emerges, hangs in the balance, is not quite distinguishable from a lie. Letters to Gwen John...is a profound act of truth-telling made possible by the thrilling risk of tarrying at that contested border. Paul's writing is a kind of ritual, as well as a pilgrimage, in which she leads us into those hidden places where understanding is beside the point, and invites us simply to dwell with her and whomever else she summons.

A loving and inquiring text, a lyrical correspondence between two women filtered through the inner life of one. It is also an intimate cataloguing of how loneliness and desire transmute to artistic awakening.

A unique combination of memoir and artistic biography, interspersed with original artworks, from the acclaimed artist and author of SELF-PORTRAIT. 
 
We are both painters. We can connect to each other through images, in our own unvoiced language. But I will try and reach you with words. Through talking to you I may come alive and begin to speak. 
 
Celia Paul has felt a lifelong connection to the artist Gwen John. There are extraordinary parallels in their lives and work. Both have always made art on their own terms. Both were involved with older male artists. Both worked hard to keep themselves and the sacred flame of their creativity from being extinguished by others. 
 
Letters to Gwen John is Paul&rsquo;s imagined correspondence with this groundbreaking painter. These intimate, passionate, haunting letters offer a unique form of memoir and conversation, and an unforgettable insight into a life devoted to making art. 
 
'Beautiful, tender, and riveting. I have taken this book into my heart' 
CLAIRE-LOUISE BENNETT 
 
'A beguiling, singular work of art &ndash; a portrait of two lives, entwined through time and space' 
DAILY TELEGRAPH

Celia Paul

Praise for Letters to Gwen John

Paul interweaves John's biography ... with accounts of her own life and lyrical readings of John's paintings ... summoning a version of the artist at her most imaginative and prolific.

At once diary and confessional, biography and autobiography and something between the two... This book lets the reader into a world of sadness, loneliness and isolation. At its heart, however, is that unexpected ker ...

Powerfully honest... Her voice is deceptively plain and her insights about her own art, as well as the choices she had to make as a woman, are both illuminating and full of courage... a beautiful book.

Paul interweaves John's biography ... with accounts of her own life and lyrical readings of John's paintings ... summoning a version of the artist at her most imaginative and prolific.

At once diary and confessional, biography and autobiography and something between the two... This book lets the reader into a world of sadness, loneliness and isolation. At its heart, however, is that unexpected ker ...

Powerfully honest... Her voice is deceptively plain and her insights about her own art, as well as the choices she had to make as a woman, are both illuminating and full of courage... a beautiful book.

Paul interweaves John's biography ... with accounts of her own life and lyrical readings of John's paintings ... summoning a version of the artist at her most imaginative and prolific.

At once diary and confessional, biography and autobiography and something between the two... This book lets the reader into a world of sadness, loneliness and isolation. At its heart, however, is that unexpected ker ...

Powerfully honest... Her voice is deceptively plain and her insights about her own art, as well as the choices she had to make as a woman, are both illuminating and full of courage... a beautiful book.

Books by Celia Paul

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