‘Everything that enters this room becomes encrusted with paint,’
Celia Paul warns, smiling, as she ushers me into her artist’s studio,
tucked away at the top of a mansion block opposite the British
Museum. Empty tubes are strewn across the wooden floor, works
in progress are propped up on an easel, and one corner is home to
her ‘painting garment’, a simple white dress whose spattering of
colour bears witness, she says, to ‘10 years’ hard graft’. Paul shows
me some of her current projects: a quiet, melancholic self-portrait;
a hazy seascape in soft shades of grey; a tender vignette of Frank
Paul, her son by Lucian Freud, holding his baby daughter Eve.
Next-door, her monastic living quarters are almost bare, save for
an iron bedstead, a chaise-longue and, tacked to the wall, a small
portrait of herself, drawn by Frank. Yet if the decor has barely altered
since she moved here in 1982, Paul has been on an extraordinary
journey of self-discovery, culminating in the publication of her
memoir this month – a beautifully honest account of her lifelong
dedication to art, with all the joys and sacrifices that entails. She
writes gracefully about the challenges she has faced as a woman
artist – ‘The conflict I feel about caring for someone, loving someone,
yet remaining dedicated to my art in an undivided way’ – but is
grateful for her family’s unwavering support for the austere lifestyle
she has chosen. Her husband, Steven Kupfer, lives apart from her in
Kentish Town, giving her the privacy she needs to pursue her voca-
tion. ‘We don’t in any sense resemble a married couple,’ she says,
matter-of-factly. ‘He sits for me regularly and we meet several times
a week for supper.’
For Paul, working on the book has been both liberating and cath-
artic; a way of reclaiming ownership of her story, counteracting the
‘lazy’ tendency of critics to couple her with Freud (the pair were
in a relationship between 1978 and 1988, having met while she
was a student at the Slade). ‘I was quite disturbed by the amount of
press after Lucian’s death where I was just termed his muse – several
articles didn’t even say I was a painter,’ she recalls. ‘So I do feel freed
by the book – writing it has given me a deeper sense of who I am.’
Paul is, and has been for decades, one of Britain’s greatest con-
temporary figurative painters, whose creativity seems to flourish
more with every passing year. ‘I’ve always been interested in ageing,
and now I’m getting older I’m becoming more interesting to myself,’
she says of her growing body of self-portraits, some of which will be
included in her forthcoming solo show at Victoria Miro’s Mayfair
g a ller y. There w ill a lso be pic t ures of her sister Kate – her principa l
sitter since their mother’s death in 2015 – and a series of landscapes
imbued with a heartfelt sense of loss, love and longing. ‘My mother
saw so much beauty in trees and flowers, so painting them is as much
to do with her as it is about responding to nature itself,’ says Paul.
This autumn will also see the release of the film-maker Jake Auer-
bach’s documentary about Paul, which, together with her book, is
set to offer an intriguing insight into her life and work. Some things,
however, cannot be captured on camera, nor explained in words.
‘The mystery of a painting is that you never know why it works, but
it stands on its own as a living, created thing,’ says Paul. ‘Sometimes
art is less about looking than simply feeling your way in the dark.’
‘Celia Paul’ is at Victoria Miro Mayfair (www.victoria-miro.com) from
13 November until 20 December.Celia Paul photographed
in her London studio