A new profile of Celia Paul by Karl Ove Knausgård appeared in the February 3 edition of The New Yorker. An admirer of Paul and her work, Knausgård interviewed the artist in her longtime studio and was able to view several of her new and recent paintings. Several times in the piece, he mentions and quotes from what he refers to as Paul’s “autobiography,“ Self-Portrait, published by New York Review Books in 2020.
Self-Portrait is, in part, about Paul’s former relationship with the renowned (and notably older) painter Lucien Freud. As Knausgård writes, Paul has continued to reflect on her time with Freud through her artwork, even going so far as to reproduce one of Freud’s paintings—a painting that she herself modeled for—in her own luminous style:
“This is what I see in Paul’s ‘Ghost of a Girl with an Egg’ (2022), which is not just an obvious reference to Lucian Freud’s “Naked Girl with Egg,” from four decades earlier—it is a copy of it, with an extremely complex relationship among painter and model and painting. . . . When Paul paints the same motif more than forty years later, the pose is the same, the egg is the same, but the light is nocturnal, the colors pale, clouded. The body is white and ghostly, quite without the original painting’s brutal attention to reality. While the gaze in Freud’s painting is fairly neutral, the gaze in Paul’s painting is not. It appears, rather, to be charged—with what, it is up to the viewer to determine, but in my eyes the gaze is filled with distaste, a kind of withheld dismay. . . . We see Paul’s gaze seeing Freud’s gaze on her. And not only is the gaze doubled, and the roles reversed from model to painter, but Paul is also painting as Freud here, she is retracing his steps with her brush, becoming him—she is a ghost model, he is a ghost painter. The result is frightening, as it must be when the boundaries between usually distinct entities—past and present, art and reality, power and powerlessness—become unclear.”
To read the rest of the profile, click here.