Celia Paul

A painter’s memoir of obsession, loss and creation during a trip to Venice Alone in Venice for an artist’s residency, Celia Paul records her daily painting practice. Her days are both charged with and interrupted by the turmoil she feels over the death of her husband, and her more recent obsession with a younger man. Inspired by the art, literature and atmosphere of the light-filled city around her, Paul’s meditations on love, creation, ageing and belonging are interwoven with fascinating explorations of artists and writers connected to Venice. An act of profound and deeply personal observation, Objects of Desire reveals more with each reading. This is a window into a life devoted to art, a self-portrait of an artist who longs to look unflinchingly at herself – and invites us to do the same.

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’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 – a portrait of two lives, entwined through time and space'DAILY TELEGRAPH

'Painfully honest on what it means to be a woman who puts art first, no matter what' Olivia LaingI'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 **

With original artworks throughout, an extraordinary fusion of memoir and artistic biography from the acclaimed artist and author of Self-Portrait. Dearest Gwen, I know this letter to you is an artifice. I know you are dead and that I'm alive and that no usual communication is possible between us but, as my mother used to say, "Time is a strange substance" and who knows really, with our time-bound comprehension of the world, whether there might be some channel by which we can speak to each other, if we only knew how. Celia Paul's Letters to Gwen John centers on a series of letters addressed to the Welsh painter Gwen John (1876-1939), who has long been a tutelary spirit for Paul. John spent much of her life in France, making art on her own terms and, like Paul, painting mostly women. John's reputation was overshadowed during her lifetime by her brother, Augustus John, and her lover Auguste Rodin. Through the epistolary form, Paul draws fruitful comparisons between John's life and her own: their shared resolve to protect the sources of their creativity, their fierce commitment to painting, and the ways in which their associations with older male artists affected the public's reception of their work. Letters to Gwen John is at once an intimate correspondence, an illuminating portrait of two painters (including full-color plates of both artists' work), and a writer/artist's daybook, describing Paul's first exhibitions in America, her search for new forms, her husband's diagnosis of cancer, and the onset of the global pandemic. Paul, who first revealed her talents as a writer with her memoir, Self-Portrait, enters with courage and resolve into new unguarded territory--the artist at present--and the work required to make art out of the turbulence of life.