I'm not a portrait painter. If I'm anything, I have always been an autobiographer.
Self-Portrait reveals a life truly lived through art. In this short, intimate memoir, Celia Paul moves effortlessly through time in words and images, folding in her past and present selves. From her move to the Slade School of Fine Art at sixteen, through a profound and intense affair with the older and better-known artist Lucian Freud, to the practices of her present-day studio, she meticulously assembles the surprising, beautiful, haunting scenes of a life. Paul brings to her prose the same qualities that she brings to her art: a brutal honesty, a delicate but powerful intensity, and an acute eye for visual detail.
At its heart, this is a book about a young woman becoming an artist, with all the sacrifices and complications that entails. As she moves out of Freud's shadow, and navigates a path to artistic freedom, Paul's power and identity as an artist emerge from the page.
Self-Portrait is a uniquely arresting, poignant book, and a work of art and literature by a singular talent.
'Fascinating... Painfully honest on what it means to be a woman who puts art first, no matter what.' Olivia Laing, New Statesman
**Shortlisted for the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2019**
Industry Reviews
"Her story is striking. It is not, as has been assumed, the tale of a muse who later became a painter, but an account of a painter who, for ten years of her early life, found herself mistaken for a muse, by a man who did that a lot. Her book is about many things besides Freud: her mother, her childhood, her sisters, her paintings. But she neither rejects her past with Freud nor rewrites it... One of the subtle methods of this crafty book is insinuation, creating new feminist genealogies and hierarchies by implication... [A] powerful little book... What else will we start to see now the mist of misogyny begins to clear? Self-Portrait will go some way to clearing that mist from the world of portraiture."
