Celia Paul is “a person in love with the romance of that which can never be,” or so says critic Hilton Als in a new monograph of her work. That sense of nostalgia permeates the British painter’s oeuvre, collected for the first time in Celia Paul: Works 1975–2025, which includes five essays, including one by the artist herself. The alternatively crusty and drippy surfaces of Paul’s paintings are intensely tactile — they feel like a show of strength or, as she has put it, “defiance.” Paul has called herself an “autobiographer” rather than a portrait painter, and the way this book presents her life’s work confirms that title. Her life comes into focus as she returns to the same subjects again and again: the women in her family, the British Museum, and the sea.
The book is weighted toward recent works, many dealing with the death of Paul’s mother in 2015. Paul painted her sisters in grief, repeatedly, and her self-portrait over and over. Paul has been one of her own chief subjects throughout her career, but she feels that she wasn’t able to paint a true likeness of herself consistently until after her mother’s death.
Her two books, Self-Portrait (2019) and Letters of Gwen John (2022), also came out of her grief. In a conversation with English artist Edmund de Waal reprinted in the book, she says that she turned to writing because “painting wasn’t a way of working through this journey of grief in the way that I needed to.” After the publication of Self-Portrait, Paul started receiving new kinds of praise and criticism from fellow women. Rachel Cusk wrote a profile of her for the New York Times Magazine, which Paul so strongly felt was incorrect that she wrote Letters to Gwen John partly as a rebuttal.
Home, or lack thereof, is another key theme throughout Paul’s life and this monograph. She was born in India to British missionary parents and moved to England with them at age five to live in a succession of vicarages until she was sent to boarding school. After beginning a relationship with Lucian Freud while a student at the Slade School of Fine Art, he bought her a flat in Bloomsbury directly opposite the British Museum, where she has lived ever since. Her life is exceptionally ascetic, but she says that “‘home’ remains a consistent source of yearning.” Her repetitive painting of herself demonstrates her profound, sustained interest in her place in the world. Now, at age 65, she writes in the monograph that she has realized that “painting myself might be like coming home.”
Gender poses a fascinating paradox in Paul’s work, and all the writing in the book touches on this in some way, including her own. She mostly paints women, but her own writing describes how she has always been defined, and desperate to be accepted, by men. Unusually, the eponymous painting in Paul’s current show Colony of Ghosts at Victoria Miro Gallery in London depicts men: artists Freud, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, and Michael Andrews. Writing about the painting in the monograph, she says, “I belong among them, even if they can’t let me in.” It’s both a statement of confidence in her ambition as an artist and a vulnerable admission of her yearning to belong. In the exhibition, “Colony of Ghosts” is hung opposite one of Paul’s most recent self-portraits, in which she reclines on a chaise lounge wearing a smock covered in paint splatters, staring them all down.
Paul has written about herself more than many artists, but bringing so many of her works together with her words, and those she commissioned others to write about her, evokes a rich sense of who she thinks she is — and how she wants to be perceived. There is a haunting instability about the image that emerges, fraught with competing strands of austerity and audacity.
Celia Paul: Works 1975–2025 (2025) is published by MACK and is available online and through independent booksellers.