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拍品专文
While Celia Paul was studying at the Slade School of Fine Art, she developed a close friendship with artist and writer Angus Cook, who was reading English at University College. In the late 1980s and early 1990s Angus and his then-partner Cerith Wyn Evans began to sit regularly for Celia Paul and Lucian Freud, her lover at the time, and both Paul and Freud produced some tender and emotional paintings of the pair. Angus and Cerith also introduced Freud to their friend, the performance artist Leigh Bowery, who would become one of Freud's most important sitters at that time.
In 1991, Cook wrote that ‘through all her work the sense of sight is associated with a world of potential, within. This is how the ineffable is able to be communicated’ (exhibition catalogue, Celia Paul, Paintings and Drawings, Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1991). This arresting and uncanny portrait is rendered with a diffused light and layered textures, painted in a subdued palette. Light enters from the left which casts heavy shadows across the men’s faces, highlighting the slanted composition instilling a subtle yet palpable sense of unease. This portrait is a rich demonstration of Paul’s ability to depict moving psychological tensions.
Following the birth of Freud and Paul’s child Frank in 1984, the couple started to drift from one another as she sensed his love for another woman. This portrait of Angus and Cerith mirrors the same inner exploration and solitude Paul was undergoing as she navigated motherhood and her shifting relationship with Freud. Paul creates an atmosphere of poignant stillness within the composition, wherein the figures appear absorbed in their individual introspective contemplations. Despite their physical closeness they appear emotionally distant from one another, emphasised through the cool-toned hues and the pair’s detached, downcast gazes. As Paul recounts in her memoir, late at night during their breaks from sitting for these portraits: ‘the three of us would right all the wrongs and injustices in the world, and we would always end up in tears. We laughed a lot, too’ (C. Paul, Self Portrait, London, 2019, p. 150).
In 1991, Cook wrote that ‘through all her work the sense of sight is associated with a world of potential, within. This is how the ineffable is able to be communicated’ (exhibition catalogue, Celia Paul, Paintings and Drawings, Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1991). This arresting and uncanny portrait is rendered with a diffused light and layered textures, painted in a subdued palette. Light enters from the left which casts heavy shadows across the men’s faces, highlighting the slanted composition instilling a subtle yet palpable sense of unease. This portrait is a rich demonstration of Paul’s ability to depict moving psychological tensions.
Following the birth of Freud and Paul’s child Frank in 1984, the couple started to drift from one another as she sensed his love for another woman. This portrait of Angus and Cerith mirrors the same inner exploration and solitude Paul was undergoing as she navigated motherhood and her shifting relationship with Freud. Paul creates an atmosphere of poignant stillness within the composition, wherein the figures appear absorbed in their individual introspective contemplations. Despite their physical closeness they appear emotionally distant from one another, emphasised through the cool-toned hues and the pair’s detached, downcast gazes. As Paul recounts in her memoir, late at night during their breaks from sitting for these portraits: ‘the three of us would right all the wrongs and injustices in the world, and we would always end up in tears. We laughed a lot, too’ (C. Paul, Self Portrait, London, 2019, p. 150).