Self-Portrait

Reviews

In this fascinating memoir, you watch a woman being gradually eviscerated by love-torture. Illustrated with Celia Paul's paintings, it is partly a pitilessly honest re-living of that ten-year episode of her life, and partly a meditation on the eternal problem of how to juggle lovesickness and an artistic career. It's also an enthralling examination of female self-esteem: how it can be slowly destroyed and, eventually, rescued. Paul is one of the most thoughtful and significant living women artists and Self-Portrait helps suggest why… Her painting and writing are of a piece — closely observed, not seeking to flatter, and with people always as her focus. Beguiling… Self-Portrait illuminates how supremely difficult it is to make an artistic practice work alongside the demands of care-giving and home-making… The author draws on the rare reflective power she exhibits in her art, to communicate what, she found, painting could not. Compelling... The story she relates through images and words has the feel of a painter’s parable, in which hardship, sacrifice and solitude lead, eventually, to something like grace... Paul is uninterested in making herself appear more palatable for the benefit of a reader. She accounts for her life like a person peeling off her bandages, often asking her audience to share in her experiences of difficulty and hurt. Fascinating... Paul's paintings, interspersed throughout the book, are quite extraordinary - ambiguous and mystical... Her style is passionate [and] direct. Captivating... Mesmerizing... Paul's powers of observation are keen and often ruthless. A poetic, sometimes painfully honest memoir. I loved the painter Celia Paul’s memoir Self-Portrait. It’s fascinating for its account of her long-term lover Lucian Freud (he emerges as the ultimate man-baby, by turns charismatic, needy and breathtakingly selfish), but it’s also painfully honest on what it means to be a woman who puts art first, no matter what. The publication of this, her first book, is of great significance... Having recently returned to writing again, she has found a new confidence, in words, in herself and in her painting... No longer wanting to remain simply a part of Freud’s story, she wanted to make him part of her story, a narrative about her life as a painter. ... Paul’s memoir therefore seems fresh, and comes as a surprise. A story of obsession and manipulation that sends our feelings on a rollercoaster... [Self-Portrait] turns into a sort of myth about the misuse of fame and the male ego, about the struggles faced by creative women, about the body in all its guises. Like a myth, it unfolds with confusions and contradictions, a terrible inevitability and many, many discomfiting truths. Expand reviews