Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul

I first came across Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul simply by browsing in Waterstones Piccadilly. It was on one of those display tables, and I was struck by how beautiful it was. Jonathan Cape have done a lovely job. It’s a chunky hardback with thick paper, and a striking photograph on the front from Celia Paul’s studio. Everything about it feels luxurious and artistic and interesting – but I didn’t know anything about Celia Paul or Gwen John, and so I felt I couldn’t indulge.

A few blog posts and instagram posts and whatnot later, it was firmly on my wishlist. My friend Clare bought it for my most recent birthday – and it was the perfect book to read in the period between Christmas and New Year. I absolutely loved it.

If, like me, you’re not familiar with Paul or John – Gwen John was an artist who lived 1876-1939. She grew up in Wales and later studied at the Slade School of Art, becoming one of the foremost female artists of her generation – indeed, many would argue simply one of the foremost artists.

Celia Paul, meanwhile, is an artist who is still painting today. She grew up in a vicarage and, like John, studied at the Slade School of Art and is (according to her author blurb) ‘recognised as one of the most important painters working in Britain today’. Importantly, she was born twenty years after Gwen John died – and so Letters to Gwen John is not a collection of letters as we might be most familiar with the concept. Rather, Paul is writing to a kindred spirit who will never read the letters or write back. It is an imagined sisterhood between women with a great amount in common.

Besides their profession, there is a significant commonality that Paul writes a lot about in this book: both women were associated with more famous, male artists. Gwen John’s brother, Augustus John, seems to have been very supportive – and she was in a relationship with (and model for) Auguste Rodin, who was 35 years older than her. Paul, meanwhile, had a ten-year relationship and a son with Lucian Freud – starting when she was 18 and he was in his mid-50s. This is not overtly a ‘me too’ story from Paul, but it’s hard to imagine any sexual relationship between an 18-year-old and a 55-year-old that doesn’t have, at the very least, a severe power imbalance.

Paul doesn’t shy away from the non-painting elements of their lives. Or, rather, much Letters to Gwen John explores how these preoccupations and the demands of powerful men can interfere with the main purpose of your life: your art. There is something both refreshing and shocking about the way she is clear that nothing – including her son – is allowed to interefere with her art. The brutality of her determination shouldn’t feel any more shocking because she is a woman – Lucian Freud certainly didn’t let paternity interfere with his work – except that she also fixates on the maternal guilt she feels.

I devoted myself to him at these times. I think he might have preferred it if I had been less intense and more casual, like the other mums he observed when he went round to friends’ houses, who spent a lot of time speaking on the phone or were preoccupied with housework. I didn’t spend much time on either of those things. My mother mostly shopped and cooked for us all. Generally the mothers of his friends didn’t leave home to go to work. Most of them didn’t work. I felt ashamed of my ambition, and I felt ashamed to be a single mum, I was ashamed of being younger than them. I couldn’t explain to most of them what my work involved. When I told one of them that I was a painter, she said, ‘That must be very relaxing.’ I know you were indignant when people reacted to your work with similar incomprehension. I didn’t feel indignant; again, I felt only shame. How could I excuse myself by saying that I often lay curled up on the floor of my studio, just thinking and planning and trying to quiet my soul, until I was focused enough to start work?

I appreciated the total honesty with which Paul writes. It felt genuinely like letters to a friend – letters that expose the soul, that are stumbling towards a philosophy. She exposes her self and her decisions with a mix of determination and uncertainty. Paul is sure that her art has been worth sacrificing everything to – and yet, simultaneously, unable to escape guilt. As she writes of John, in the sections between letters that are more exploratory biography: ‘Despite her apparent timidity, Gwen was always certain of her talent.’

This is the personal side of Letters to Gwen John – but what made me love the book so much was the way John treats her writing as the meeting of minds. There is so much about the artistic process in here – about the choices that can make or break a painting; about the rationale behind decisions and what composition or colouring are intended to convey. She writes often of the fear of ‘killing’ a painting, or of a painting ‘coming to life’. I loved how she combined very practical concerns – the exact paint colours she uses, and the techniques – with something much more nebulous.

I mixed Prussian Blue, Chrome Green, Vandyck Brown, Payne’s Grey and Brilliant Yellow and spread it in a thin layer across my willow tree. It already suggested water. But then I started to feel haunted by the loss of my tree, and I scraped off the grey layer of paint with this scraper that I’d bought from a hardware shop. It left horizontal lines across the image, suggestive of water, and my willow appeared like a ghostly reflection. I thought maybe I’d discovered a mystical new interpretation to a way of painting. I want to do more paintings of reflections in water. I thought I needed to intensify the gleaming highlights of the watery streaks across the tree. I couldn’t leave it alone, and I fear I may have killed it. It took all my courage to take it off the easel and place it, stretcher side out, against the wall. I’ll look at it again after a while.

One of the most special things about the luxury of this book is how many paintings – both by Paul and John – are reproduced. Often they are placed next to each other in a way that feels like a conversation between images. Paul’s self-portrait by John’s, for instance, or two domestic interiors. More paintings are discussed than included, unsurprisingly, so I did turn to Google images often – but it’s wonderful to have so many of the paintings that Paul writes about available to see in between chapters.

I enjoy painting sometimes but am certainly not an artist – yet I loved this glimpse into an imagined community, a sorority of artists who have had to battle forces external and internal – and who remained totally committed to their integrity and purpose as creative artists. Paul writes beautifully (annoyingly well for someone who is only latterly a writer!) and Letters to Gwen John is a special gem of a book.