Me, myself and I: Meet Celia Paul, the solitary self-portrait artist exposing herself in Warsaw
"It feels like a crisis every time I pick up a brush and paint, it's life or death." There's no sense of exaggeration or drama when Celia Paul talks about her work but her paintings speak volumes about, tenderness, spirituality and the people she loves most.
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00:00Who are you? Is it a question you can answer easily?
00:10Well, I can answer it basically. I can just say I'm Celia Paul.
00:14Of course, I'm a painter, absolutely.
00:17I've painted more or less every day of my life since I was 15.
00:23So, yes, everything else is secondary to that.
00:28Are you your own muse?
00:31Of course. I mean, muse is such a, become quite a hackneyed word,
00:38but I paint myself as well as other people I know well.
00:43Is it difficult to paint yourself and also maybe hear criticism?
00:49Well, I never mind about criticism because I'm, you know, you can't.
00:55But I am self-questioning always and it took a long time for me to be able to paint myself.
01:05I could paint other people I knew well but couldn't paint myself until I was much older.
01:13Why was it?
01:15It's partly the surface of the mirror.
01:17You have to be so static in front of the glass and when you paint other people,
01:23they're always slightly in movement and can turn their head away.
01:28And if you're looking in the mirror, you can't do that.
01:32So there's a kind of strain to the look in the mirror.
01:37But then when I got older, I started to reference photographs of me and paintings of me.
01:46And in that way I got an outsider view of myself, which was easier and somehow more true to how I feel inside.
01:57So how was Celia before? She was brave enough to start painting herself and afterwards?
02:04Well, I was a child, so I was different.
02:08I was born in India, actually.
02:10My parents were missionaries, Christian missionaries.
02:14And when we came back to England when I was five, my father became head of an evangelical Christian community
02:22in the most beautiful part of England, in the West Country, right by the sea.
02:28And I was, in my early adolescence, nature became more and more important to me.
02:37And my earliest paintings were of the beauty of nature.
02:42Not landscapes, but flowers and objects I found and made kind of still lives from.
02:50And it was that that got me into the Slade when I was only 16.
02:56So I moved from a very remote part of Devon to central London at the age of 16, where I was very much alone.
03:04And I shifted from working from nature to working from people because the emphasis was on life drawing, on the nude.
03:14So I started to get interested in painting people.
03:18But my first real breakthrough was painting my mother, who started to sit for me when I was 17.
03:28And I realized, actually, this is my subject matter.
03:32My mother is my subject matter.
03:34And she went on sitting for me twice a week for 30 years until she got too old to climb the 80 stairs to my studio.
03:46What did you see in your mother that interested you the most?
03:50Well, I think it's crucial to paint what means something to the artist.
03:58If you don't have something urgent to express, then there's no point in painting.
04:06And the person who mattered most to me was my mother.
04:10And I think you can see it in all great portraits.
04:14If the artist loves the sitter, something different happens.
04:20You can see it with Rembrandt's paintings of his mother, for example.
04:25And I wanted that kind of intensity in my work.
04:29Do you also put, like, romantic love into your paintings?
04:36More recently I have.
04:39But earlier than that, I'm one of five sisters.
04:43So I painted them, and particularly my younger sister, Kate.
04:51But when I've painted subjects to do with romantic love, I haven't worked from life.
04:58I've worked either from paintings.
05:01I've been thinking a lot about, there's a Giorgione painting called La Tempesta,
05:08which is probably one of the most romantic images between a man and a woman.
05:14And then photographs.
05:16I've been painting between myself, when I was young, and my lover, Lucien Freud,
05:26who I met when I was 18 at the Slade School of Art.
05:32And he was a tutor. He was 55.
05:35And I had a very long relationship with him.
05:40And at the beginning, I was very in love with him.
05:46What do you learn about yourself during your painting sessions?
05:50It feels like a crisis every time I pick up a brush and paint its life or death.
05:59So why is it worth it?
06:01Well, because to try and get some intensity, to try and capture the moment as it's passing,
06:10time is an extraordinary thing that I've always, from the very beginning,
06:16had this feeling of, I suppose, life and death.
06:21I think it's to do with growing up in a religious family, this feeling that this life is not going to be forever.
06:31Are you a religious person right now also?
06:34That's such a difficult question. I prefer the word spiritual.
06:39I mean, the only thing that matters to me in art, really, is the spiritual.
06:46I'm attracted to stillness in a painting or a work of art.
06:53That's the quality I look for, and beauty.
06:57What do you like the most about your paintings?
07:00I think there has to be a true emotion, which is quite difficult to define, but you can tell when something's fake.
07:12I mean, not to do with whether it's done by, you know, not to be...
07:17Yeah, but you can tell if the feeling is false, and if perhaps there's no need for this person to have painted this painting.
07:29You can really sense if there is a necessity to a work of art, and that's what I look for.
07:38And what feeling do you see when you look at your paintings from the past?
07:45I always try to spend a lot of time just thinking about where my life is now, what matters to me now.
07:56And it changes all the time.
08:00Three years ago, my husband, Stephen Kupfer, died, and a lot of my work after that became about grief.
08:11Because in a space of a few years, Lucian Freud died, my mother died, and Stephen died.
08:20And these three people were tremendously important to me.
08:27So I started to think about grief a lot in all my work, and about the past.
08:34And I think I'm gradually shifting away from that, and I want to aim towards something more tender, I think.
08:47After some years, do you see the grief differently?
08:51Well, I think everyone who's experienced grief knows that it comes in waves, and that actually nothing is ever the same afterwards.
09:04But in a strange way, I've become very liberated, because I'm now completely on my own, and actually it's tremendously exciting to be on my own.
09:18I can do what I want, when I want, and my work just has been getting stronger, and bigger, and more daring, and I'm just so longing to get back to the studio as I speak to you.
09:37You also told me before our conversation that you don't go out a lot, you don't travel a lot, you find your peace at your place, at your studio?
09:47Yes, I've worked in the same studio in Bloomsbury, right in front of the British Museum.
09:55It has a forecourt, a view onto the forecourt of the British Museum.
10:00I've been there since I was 22, and I don't think I could work anywhere else in the same way.
10:06It's the street I live in. My studio is also where I live.
10:12It's one of the noisiest streets in London.
10:16But somehow my studio has this extraordinary silence, because of all the people who have sat for me in silence, because I always paint in silence.
10:30And for the amount of time I've spent by myself thinking.
10:38I think from a child I've always had this quality of stillness, even when I was very little.
10:46A child in the garden in India, I could sit for hours just not moving, which is quite strange for a child, because you see children, they're usually very lively.
10:59But I wasn't like that.
11:00Are you inside also still, or there is chaos inside of you?
11:04No, I'm an anxious person. I worry a lot, mainly about my painting.
11:13But I don't think I'm a chaotic person. I'm a very rigorous thinker and read a lot.
11:31And my work is quite a lot about ideas.
11:34Let's have a minute to talk about this exhibition.
11:38We are here in Warsaw and it's very special. It's all women artists, female artists, pieces of art here.
11:47How do you feel like your painting is between all of those amazing artists and that you are also here?
11:55I think what strikes me particularly is that each work of art here had to be fought for.
12:05A woman artist has to really fight for her freedom in quite a different way to a male artist.
12:12There's still this expectation that a woman should be a carer, a support, whatever her status or vocation.
12:28And so for each woman who has produced a work of art here, she had to fight for her space.
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