Painting Myself

When I look in the mirror, I can’t see myself. Perhaps the difficulty I experience is due to the static posture I must assume in front of the glass. If I glance away, I’m gone—like a butterfly escaping the net. I can set up mirrors to view all sides of my head. In profile I look as though I were focused on something else, someone else. Looking at myself from the back, I am surprised by the roundness of my shoulders. But when I see myself obliquely in this way, it isn’t a true encounter: I can’t engage with myself.

When I first started to draw at the age of fifteen, I made schematic attempts at self-representation. I depicted the bump on the end of my nose, my long neck, and my dark eyebrows. The resulting drawings were lifeless. I felt freer when I worked from other people I knew well—better than I knew myself.

The first self-portrait that looked like me came about when a charcoal image I’d made in a sketchbook printed itself onto the opposite page. The shadowy imprint miraculously suggested a likeness, whereas the initial drawing was wide of the mark. Was it the reversal that made this self-portrait authentic? A mirror image is a reversal, after all. I tried the trick again, but it never worked.

Three years later I made a drawing that successfully captured my appearance. Once more it seemed to happen by accident. I had done a series of ink-wash self-portraits. I didn’t think any of them were good, so I discarded them. They lay around on my studio floor for a while, and I often absentmindedly walked over them—the splintered floorboards have always been littered with tubes of paint and scraps of abandoned artworks that I ignore as part of my natural habitat. One day a friend visited and immediately saw that one of the self-portraits on the floor was good (see illustration at top of article). I hadn’t realized this at all until it was pointed out to me.

Thirty years passed before I felt free enough to represent myself in an ambitiously new way. My mother was my main sitter for all those years. Somehow her adored image blotted out my own. It took her death in 2015 for me to be able to start to see myself. And then I found a way in.

I am one of five sisters. We are always being compared with one another, as people tend to compare one woman with another in the wider world beyond the family unit. I don’t think men suffer to the same extent from this diminishment. A man retains his singularity even in a group of men. I decided to try and confront the complex problem of female individuality in my self-portraits.

In 2013, when my mother entered her final illness, I made a series of five paintings. In each one I am dressed in an identical black sweater. I depicted just the head and shoulders: the focus is on the face. At the exhibition, I wanted my audience to ask themselves whether these were portraits of sisters, or whether they were of the same person; I needed them to question “likeness” and what it is that makes a person an individual.

These self-portraits felt like a breakthrough to me. I hadn’t tried to pedantically copy my reflection. With each one I began by looking in the mirror, and then I turned away and dreamed up the image of myself. My dreaming self-portrait was psychologically truer than my reflected image. The glass that separated me from myself continued to frustrate me, however. I wanted to do away with it, to smash it and get at the essence of who I am. My reflected “she” wasn’t the real “I.”

I considered Lucian Freud’s paintings of me, where I was the model, not the artist. They were all made when I was a young woman—the first when I was twenty, the last when I was twenty-seven. I have never sat for another artist since, yet the label of “muse” has stuck. It is a frustrating and corrosive feeling to be compartmentalized in this way.

I wondered whether I could undermine the lazy public labeling so that I could be seen as the artist I am. Perhaps my appearance as represented by another artist might give me an objective insight into myself. Could I take control of Lucian’s representation of me? By capturing myself through his eyes, could I free myself?

Naked Girl with Egg (1980–1981) was his first painting of me. I was a very self-conscious, self-doubting twenty-year-old then, unsure of my desirability and traumatized by the knowledge that Lucian was sleeping with other women. I was deeply in love with him, and I felt vulnerable and exposed and powerless. The young woman with the alarmed eyes and vanquished expression, as depicted by Lucian, bore little resemblance to my inner “I.” There is no way that his painting could have been titled Portrait of Celia Paul. I was most definitely a Naked Girl, lying on a black bedsheet.

In my own painting, Ghost of a Girl with an Egg (2022), I omitted Lucian’s arbitrary detail of the peeling plaster on the walls by the bed, which I felt was extraneous. My body is surrounded by the swirling black cloth, a sea of dark water on which I am floating. My body is very white. I have turned a meaty representation of flesh into a haunting and spiritual one.

Painter and Model (1986–1987) is the last painting Lucian made of me. It shows me standing at left with my head bowed, a paintbrush in my hands, and my bare foot on a paint tube. A naked male figure with splayed legs is lying on the sofa in front of me.

After Lucian’s death in 2011, I made a painting also titled Painter and Model (2012). In it I am seated alone in the center of the painting with my eyes downcast, and my hands are resting in my lap as if I were sitting meekly for my artist-lover. But the dress I am wearing is encrusted with paint—I wipe my brush on my clothes while I am working—and the tubes of paint at my feet are my own: in this self-portrait, I am both painter and model.

In 2022 I went one step further. In a painting that I’ve titled simply Painter, I am no longer anyone’s model. While I’ve followed Lucian’s basic composition, I’ve erased the male figure he depicted. I stand at left and hold my brush in my clasped hands. My hands cast a shadow that resembles a breast, as they do in Lucian’s painting, and my bare foot is placed on a squeezed-out paint tube. But my subject matter is a sea-like absence. There is no lover in front of me waiting to oblige. My painting is a starkly pared-down self-representation, strong and true to the solitude of my discipline.

In my London studio I recently completed Colony of Ghosts (2023), a painting inspired by John Deakin’s famous 1963 photograph of four giants of the so-called School of London—Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, and Michael Andrews—dining in Wheeler’s restaurant in Soho. I decided to leave out the fifth diner—Tim Behrens, sitting uneasily on the far left—because I don’t admire his art, and because he was only included because he sat for Lucian. I didn’t want to be identified with him as the muse.

I toyed with the idea of titling my painting Homage, Dommage, Home, but I thought that, said aloud, the beat would sound like a nursery rhyme. I intended the portrait as an homage to these great artists, yet I felt excluded by them because of my gender—hence dommage, the French for “shame” or “pity.” They represent “home” to me because I belong among them, even if they can’t let me in. I also considered titling it Belonging/Not Belonging. I wondered whether it is a source of anxiety to achieve acceptance into the male club, and whether for many men the symbols of status override other desires. I think the men in my painting look a little insecure for this reason.

Even though they form a homogeneous group, each man in my painting is singular and distinct and has a very specific presence. Freud is gazing unflinchingly at the viewer. Bacon, with one eye heavily lidded and the other wide open, is projecting an actorly aura. Auerbach never looks at the person he is speaking to; he keeps his eyes lowered or shut. Andrews—the only Englishman among them—is self-effacing. The painting measures four by six feet, the same size as Andrews’s The Colony Room I (1962), and I have used the same viridian green for the walls. In the Deakin photograph, there is a romantic painting in a circular frame hanging on the wall behind the artist-diners. I have echoed its positioning, with its depiction of an unworldly landscape, almost like those shimmering paths or rivers leading to the mountains that form the backdrop in Italian paintings, suggestive of an unreachableness, a lost paradise, a yearning.

All four men are now dead; they inhabit a different dimension. In the painting I have cleared the table of its clutter of plates, glasses, and napkins. The tablecloth resembles shifting water, or an ectoplasm. The men are looking at me, looking at you, from out of the strange cold land of the dead.

I often feel like a ghost myself. I have lived in this apartment—which is also my studio—since 1982, and my memories are more alive than my present existence. As a pair to Colony of Ghosts, and in the same dimensions, I have painted a self-portrait that I’ve titled Reclining Painter (2023). I am lying on my battered green chaise longue, and though my head is turned to the viewer, my gaze is inward: I am thinking of the past. I am alone now, yet the painted world I live in has accrued substance—my dress, the furniture, the walls, everywhere, every surface, is splattered and saturated with paint. The paint lives in the present tense, always.

I would like to hang Reclining Painter opposite Colony of Ghosts so that the men can observe me, and I can observe them, and so that there can be an interaction between us.

The interaction between Lucian and me was about painting, and it was about love. We were in a ten-year relationship, and I had a son by him. My son, Frank, and I are close. When he was a child, I put up boundaries: my mother was his main carer so that I could continue painting. Yet now Frank and I can talk to each other about anything. My husband, Steven Kupfer, and I shared everything, too, even though we lived separately. Steven used to sit for me regularly, and I made many portraits of him.

When my mother was too frail to climb the eighty stairs to my studio, my sister Kate took over as my main sitter. I have painted all four of my sisters: Rosalind (called Mandy by her family), Lucy, Jane, and Kate. But the sister who has sat for me most regularly is Kate. She and I don’t need to use words to know what we are thinking. We communicate with each other at a deeper level. I have made a long series of portraits of her dressed in white. The portraits of Kate are almost self-portraits by proxy. I imagine them hanging on a wall in a long line, offering peace.

After my mother’s death, and with my growing confidence in self-portraiture, came a need to express myself in new ways. As a young woman, when I was making my first attempts at drawing myself, I also kept an occasional diary in which I recorded some of my life and my emotions. I suddenly felt an overriding need to connect to this young writing self. I started to use words again, and I published my first book, Self-Portrait, in 2019.

A painting is like a bird’s-eye view: you take in the whole scene at once. In writing, one sentence follows another, like a journey on land. There were things I needed to spell out to myself, to unravel and think through. I needed the ground-level narrative of writing to find out more clearly the direction I should take. My world was becoming increasingly narrowed down to art alone: Lucian had died, my mother had died, my son had a new life with his girlfriend and children, my husband was dying of cancer. Painting has always been the central impulse, but now it was everything. It was crucial to know what I was doing and where I was going.

When Self-Portrait came out, Rachel Cusk wrote a great, provocative article for The New York Times Magazine. Her text, which centralized my relationship with Lucian and the apartment he bought for me all those years ago, galvanized me into reexamining my personal and artistic priorities. I am, like Rachel, outraged at the way successful male painters have often abused their power, frequently treating women diabolically. But what better way to blow up the system than from within? Rachel interpreted the dilapidation of my flat and my carelessness about its (and my) appearance as signs of low self-esteem. I think she was mistaken. By staying put in that Bloomsbury apartment, I can explore the drama of my life as it unfolds.

The space where I live and work faces directly onto the forecourt of the British Museum: I am high above the trees and on a level with the topmost triangular pediment, in which the enclosed immense statues of Greek Muses preside; the swarms of tourists on the ground are ant-like in comparison. In winter, when the branches are bare, the BT Tower is revealed behind the museum, to the left. This is my world, the theatrical backdrop to my one-woman show. I don’t notice that there are leak stains on the walls and ceilings. I love that my windows are big and filled with light.

In some of my paintings of my bedroom, I have contrasted the horizontality of my bed with the phallic verticality of the tower; in others, my bed is in dialogue with the posturing grandeur of the museum’s façade. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf attributes her motivation to write the book in part to her anger at the lack of female representation in the books that lined the shelves of the museum’s vast reading room. Similarly, I would like my paintings of the room of my own to pose a question about gender—the quiet interior space versus the demonstrative showing-off of the exterior space.

Rachel’s essay contains a description of a photograph of me, Lucian, and Lucian’s daughter Bella, taken in 1983. Bella was twenty-two, I was twenty-three, and Lucian was sixty. Lucian is snuggling his face into my hair. I am smiling in response. Bella has her hand on my shoulder, affectionately. Bruce Bernard took many photographs of us that day. I am riveted by what they suggest. I have made paintings from them. There is a feeling of intense claustrophobia in all of them.

Somehow, because we are on a level—Lucian is not standing as painter but sitting with us—there’s a strange equality, as if we each had our designated parts in a play choreographed by the photographer. The images have inspired me to consider our roles, and whether any of us could have broken free or subverted the plot. Lucian seems to be as trapped in the situation—by his need for love and attention—as Bella and I are.

Rachel’s essay made me realize that I needed to write another book—to make clear the kind of painter I am. That book became Letters to Gwen John (2022). I admire Gwen John, the Welsh painter who lived from 1876 to 1939, more than any other female painter because we share a similar energy and solitary discipline. I feel an intimate connection to her because of the many parallels in our lives. We both struggled to preserve our artistic integrity while being overshadowed by powerful male artists: she was Auguste Rodin’s lover and model, as I was Lucian’s.

We also relied on men to provide a sense of home. After her mother’s death, Gwen John lived in her father’s house in Tenby until she was old enough to leave. She lived in Paris, modeling for artists including Rodin, who paid for her lodgings. She finally settled in Meudon on the outskirts of Paris, the suburb where Rodin lived with his wife. Gwen John wanted to live close to him so that she could imagine she belonged.

I was born in India. My parents were Christian missionaries. We lived in a whitewashed, red-tile-roofed house on the campus of the theological seminary where my father was principal in Kannammoola, a suburb of Trivandrum (now Thiruvananthapuram). My sisters, my mother, my father, and I were a strange sight, and we were often photographed by the Indian students: my mother in her wide-skirted flowered dresses, my father in his long white cassock, the five little girls in pretty frocks. From the beginning, I felt both displaced and focused on for my difference. This is a sensation that has persisted.

I have never wanted to create a home—hence the bareness of the studio space where I live—yet “home” remains a persistent source of yearning. My family returned from India to England when I was five, and we moved house every five years. The flat where I have lived for forty-three years contrasts with the upheaval of my childhood and symbolizes stability. Yet my craving for “home” is not satisfied.

The houses where I lived as a child and young adult were provided by my father: they were all clergy properties that came with his job. Lucian bought me the flat, which is also my studio; my husband left me his house in Kentish Town. The men in my life have provided me with my homes. The women who have mattered to me have offered me a different kind of support: they have believed in me. My mother—who sat for me with dedication for thirty years, and who brought up my son with me—was there for me always, but I never associated her with an idea of safety. The men have offered me the security of place.

I want the self-portraits I make from now on to convey a different sort of security. My recent self-portraits, which I am pleased with, owe their success to the power of my defiance. “I am a survivor,” they are clearly saying. I am self-enclosed, as if the paint were my armor.

In 2022—the same year that I painted Painter—Gautier Deblonde made a series of dramatic photographs of me in my studio, and in the room adjoining the studio, the room where I sleep. This was not long after my husband’s death. Grief had sharpened my perception of my singularity. I used a photograph of me sitting on the bed, facing outward with my ankles crossed, to make a series of three large self-portraits: Painter Seated in Her Studio (2022), Seated Painter (2023), and, finally, Painter at Home (2023). My dress, the walls, and my slippers are all splattered with paint. This is the world that I alone have created.

The main danger of painting self-portraits is, of course, the possibility of becoming a narcissist: to be so obsessed by one’s own physique and inner thoughts that the outer world and other people have no relevance except as they relate to oneself. I have started to make portraits of people I don’t know so well—young women, mainly. Through painting these young women, I would like to be less of a stranger to myself.

In the spring of 2023 I did a seven-week residency at my gallerist Victoria Miro’s studio space in Venice. During my stay there, I painted the young women who worked at the gallery, and who looked after me so kindly. I connected to the choices that were presented to them: Should they be in a relationship, or should they be independent and free? Should they have children or not? As I observed their young faces, I remembered my own, and the years of early motherhood. How alone and vulnerable I had felt then, as a young single parent, yet perhaps equally desirable as the young women I was observing now.

When Hilton Als made a selection of these paintings for an exhibition that fall, he saw that the main theme was “women in various stages of life and therefore their dreams. And acceptance.” He came up with the exhibition title: “Myself, Among Others.” When I returned from Venice, I thought: I am home. It seemed like a different sort of homecoming from any I had experienced before. I had the sudden realization that I myself could be home. My young self and I—we are the same person. I can stretch out my old hand, with its age spots, and hold my young unblemished hand.