Artworks

This extraordinary recent work brings together many of Celia Paul’s interests as a painter: the effect of light on vision, what constitutes artistic vision, family, and religion. Paul spent part of her youth in Yorkshire, near the Brontë parsonage, where the Reverend Patrick Brontë raised his extraordinary brood in rather reduced circumstances. But the Brontë children— his son, Branwell, and daughters Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—famously survived the harshness of their lives through great creative productivity, which included drawing, painting, and, of course, writing. It is impossible not to see parallels between this nineteenth-century English family and the Pauls, with their joint interest in faith, and the transformative power of making. Paul, born in 1959 to missionary parents in South India, moved with her family to England during childhood, living in north Devon, where her father was head of the Lee Abbey religious community, and near Haworth, West Yorkshire This extraordinary recent work brings together many of Celia Paul’s interests as a painter: the effect of light on vision, what constitutes artistic vision, family, and religion An affiliation with the Brontës, creative sisters and the children of a clergyman like the Pauls, intensified while Paul’s father was Bishop of Bradford, when the artist would visit the Brontë parsonage at Haworth Based on recent studies of the house made during winter, The Brontë Parsonage (with Charlotte’s Pine and Emily’s Path to the Moors), 2017, shows the building dwarfed by surrounding trees, the gravestones of the neighbouring church in the foreground and, in the distance, a hillside track glinting in the February light – motifs that signify mortality, longing and escape Yorkshire, for Celia, holds a particular quality of light and her visits in the winter surround her with wildness of the moors and loundening of the skies and the darkness She found this area really exciting to be in but it was quite sinister, it was like a type of black magic, a really intense place The title, for Celia, connected Charlotte with her great works of literature and art fuelled with romantic yearning and Emily's path to freedom, the two sisters have very different ways of using creativity and Celia attempts to engage them in this work A love of Branwell Brontë’s work, especially his painting of his three sisters, in which the artist appears as a spectral presence (c1834, in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London) was an early influence, one that encouraged Paul to make paintings of her own sisters This extraordinary recent work brings together many of Celia Paul’s interests as a painter: the effect of light on vision, what constitutes artistic vision, family, and religion