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.
12:36Thank you so much.
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