pInterinterseria Paul lives in the same flat in Bloomsbury – for her then-love Lucien Freud purchased for 40 years. To promote it, raise 80 steps and bring the level along with the pediments of the British Museum on the other side is to enter another world. Although rarely included in the main room, there are lumpy ancient chise longs and metal beds. One wall is stacked with empty, freshly extended canvases. Next to it is a range of piles of hard, paint-dyed old sheets that obscure any possible sofas. There is a huge, dusty mirror, and we both appear in the spectrum. She is painted in a slightly brown floor-length skirt with her slippers. Ask her if she is sleeping in a metal framed bed. Sometimes she says, but she shows me her bedroom. It's also Spartan, but for a huge mountain of books. “You didn't end up building many bookshelfs,” I observe weakly, facing this almost unimaginable harsh presence.
Paul – like Edmund de Ware, A vast monograph Her work, which is about to be published, is now respected for her writing as well as her art. Her self-portrait appeared in 2019. This is, among other things, a memoir explaining her relationship with Freud, who seduced her when she was 18 and in her 50s. In 2022, a letter came to Gwen John, a one-sided communication with one of her favorite artistic ancestors. These books were published in her 60s. In the transition to writing, she says. brewing. It can function evocatively in painting. But in words, another kind of order is required. One sentence must follow another. And that's what I need to do. ”
Drop things in prose – “The wounds mixed with love in my relationship with Lucian” have made her a big move that she is now working in paint, the fruit will be seen in Exhibition at Victoria Miro Gallery In London. Paul met Freud Sladeshe was a student and he was a visiting professor. It's painful to read about his teenager seduction in self-portraits. It is clear that she was emotionally pressing him down. The response to the book was also strong. Particularly stimulating reactions It was from novelist Rachel Caskimplying that Paul was still trapped in an old painter ever since his death. Paul disagreed and made many paintings to prove the points. A work that changes her memories and changing feelings about not only Freud, but the circle of people he moved.
She shows me the artwork in the studio. It is called the Crying Muse and Running Tap. Based on Freud Large interior W11 (after Wato)this is a painting of Paul in the early 1980s, along with Freud's former lover, her child, and one of his children. Paul's version holds his own appearance. Her feet seem to be submerged in the water. “I really, really didn't like sitting,” she says. “I felt trapped and I didn't want to chat. I was always crying, and I found him incredibly angry. I think men are very confused and often get mad at women crying.”
There is a tap on the background of Freud's original painting. “It's like a signal to me,” she says. Her cleavage in her new work is to soothe that pool of tears under her feet. “I think men are crying and getting mad, meaning it's so “not complete.” But that's very destructive. ”
Nearby is a portrait of her mother. She's back in the studio so she can adjust the details before she goes out to the show again. She made it when her mother was 65, her own age now. She was 30 years old. “It looks like her.” The older woman, a devout Christian, used her time as a daughter's sitter for contemplation and prayer. In contrast, Freud liked the sitter to focus on him and chatted, and hated it when Paul disappeared into his world. I observe that her paintings are spiritual and introverted, and that he is about the surface, skin, and flesh. “I think that's what Lucian is so uneasy about my paintings. That's where our paths really split up. When he saw me going that different direction, it was a hindrance to him that he couldn't control me,” she says. “Because his paintings are actually about control.”
When Freud took her to eat with his grand painter friends, Chat was always tortured by the shy Paul: Frank Auerbach (Paul named her and Freud's son after him). Francis Bacon; Michael Andrews. “Francis knew how to be incredibly polite, but he cut devastated,” she says. “I didn't say anything through those dinners, but one day Lucian said, 'I hope you say something' so I decided to actually pipe it up next time. We were talking about the Michael Andrews exhibition, and I gave some opinions. Francis saw me in this very mean atmosphere and returned to Lucien. Lucian then said it was because my voice sounded hysterical. ”
She says this practical matter and leaves it up to me to edit the cruelty and sexism of this exchange. Her own reaction comes with paint. There is Famous photos Confidence, Animation, Handsome, Boosie – John Deakin, a man diner at Wheeler's restaurant. Paul used it as a foundation for his new paintings and as a ghost colony. In her work, they stare at Grayley, who is no longer animated, like from another dimension.
She also draws her companion piece, lying on the uncomfortable chaise longue where I'm stopped. It is intended to hang the other side of a ghost colony. She is very self-owned in this picture and offers an appreciation gaze to the man who once threatened her. There's one from Jack Louis David Portrait of Madame Lecamier about it. The piece “see my experience of being at the table, but not being choked out and welcome. But they are all dead, so there's also a sense of being really friendly now,” she adds: I feel like they are all pretty bothered. ”
Paul may have had a quiet meal at a man's table, but she was five or so older than the young British artist who became famous in the 1990s, and the work was not very compatible with her own work. “People were really saying, 'The paintings are dead,' so I found those years to be very difficult,” she says. “It was devastating because painting was my life. It seems like this party that I was definitely excluded.”
Although she had a very early success, the tide had already turned when she held her first solo exhibition at the Marlboro Gallery by 1991. There was little response. By this time she and Freud had split. She had a flat, and Marlborough gave her a scholarship of £14,000 a year as a prepayment for sales. Her son was raised primarily by a country mother, but she continued to work at Bloomsbury for a week, drawing despite everything. “It's been an incredible struggle for a long time.”
The cultural environment eventually changed. The painting has returned to conversation. In 2012, the Parant House Gallery in Chichester showed her work alongside her beloved Gwenjong's work. The Victoria Miro Gallery took her. But there was a shift inside her too. “Lucian passed away in 2011. I didn't do that I felt it He was restrained. But I think that must have been the case. Because at that point I thought, “I really need to change my life.” ”
Works that directly communicate with Freud's paintings are just one way she has worked on in the past. She also made many self-portraits – she also made herself, as she imagined herself as she once was, and as she once saw by men. These works have a core of new strength and self-guarantees. But she also plans to retreat into the inner and spirit world again. As the new exhibition gets out of the way, blank canvases stack up on her flats waiting for painting.
