Writing in her autobiography Self-Portrait, Celia Paul comments that ‘I have noticed that the men I have worked from are interested in the process of painting and in the act of sitting. The silence, when I am working from men, is less interior.’ Paul’s painting Steve, 2019, depicts her husband, the philosopher Steven Kupfer who, she writes, ‘memorises cryptic crossword clues the night before and solves them in his head as he sits… He likes the challenge of it all, and his ritual is part of the pleasure he takes in sitting. I think he needs his participation to be “active”.’