Seascapes and paintings of water are an enduring motif in Paul’s art. During the 1970s, her father was head of the Lee Abbey religious community in north Devon, where she became familiar with a stretch of coastline that influenced a number of works. Taking the idea of portraiture in a more elemental direction, Paul’s water paintings are permeated by a sense of mortality, of bodies becoming dissolute and consciousness shifting into water, energy and light. While the artist has spoken of her waterscapes in terms of feeling in flux, even grief, for Paul solace can be found in the consoling beauty of nature and the flow of time that connects us all.

Born in 1959 in Trivandrum, India, Celia Paul lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include Celia Paul, curated by Hilton Als (Pulitzer Prize-winning author, staff writer and theatre critic for The New Yorker and associate professor of writing at Columbia University), which originated at the Yale Centre for British Art in 2018 and subsequently toured to The Huntington; and Desdemona for Celia by Hilton, at the Gallery Met, New York (2015–16). Paul’s paintings were also included in All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life at Tate Britain, 2018. Last year, the artist published her memoir Self-Portrait, praised by notable critics, including Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books. Self-Portrait is published in the US on 10 November 2020 by New York Review Books. Paul has just finished working with filmmaker Jake Auerbach on a documentary about her life.