Kate by the Window

Celia Paul’s Kate by the Window belongs to a deeply personal body of work in which family members, particularly her sisters and mother, become the subjects of sustained looking. The sitter in the present work – her sister Kate – is caught in profile, her facial features half-veiled by shadow and half-lit by a reflective glow. Paul’s palette is still sombre, still muted and still contemplative; and yet, her modulation of light – specifically on the sofa, aspects of the wall and Kate’s hair – transforms the scene. Kate’s form is imbued with a luminosity that seems to come from within. She is subtly radiant, and her silhouetted presence in the painting carries weight. Paul thus invests this quiet domestic scene with a sense of gravity and otherworldliness. Indeed, as Angus Cook has observed, 'The joy of seeing light, and of painting it, are related to a spiritual optimism' (exhibition catalogue, Celia Paul: Paintings and Drawings, London, Marlborough Fine Art, 1991).

The loss of Paul's father in 1983 was felt heavily by the family, and grief lingers in many of Paul’s paintings from the 1980s. Focusing intently on Kate thus becomes an act of both intimacy and mourning, and Paul’s interplay of dark and light becomes an interesting study of both absence and presence; dejection and optimism. Perhaps her mother encapsulates the nature of the work’s intimacy best: 'Kate can say things and Celia will listen; there is a relaxation to Celia when Kate is there … Kate is wise and loving; it was their closeness that changed the mood' (ibid., p. 4). In this light, Kate by the Window is far from a detached portrait, despite the sitter looking away, but is rather a meditation on love between sisters, the importance and fragility and memory, and art’s ability to preserve emotion.