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Title details for Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul - Available

Letters to Gwen John

by Celia Paul
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With original artworks throughout, an extraordinary fusion of memoir and artistic biography from the acclaimed artist and author of Self-Portrait.
Dearest Gwen, I know this letter to you is an artifice. I know you are dead and that I’m alive and that no usual communication is possible between us but, as my mother used to say, “Time is a strange substance” and who knows really, with our time-bound comprehension of the world, whether there might be some channel by which we can speak to each other, if we only knew how.
Celia Paul’s Letters to Gwen John centers on a series of letters addressed to the Welsh painter Gwen John (1876–1939), who has long been a tutelary spirit for Paul. John spent much of her life in France, making art on her own terms and, like Paul, painting mostly women. John’s reputation was overshadowed during her lifetime by her brother, Augustus John, and her lover Auguste Rodin. Through the epistolary form, Paul draws fruitful comparisons between John’s life and her own: their shared resolve to protect the sources of their creativity, their fierce commitment to painting, and the ways in which their associations with older male artists affected the public’s reception of their work.
Letters to Gwen John is at once an intimate correspondence, an illuminating portrait of two painters (including full-color plates of both artists’ work), and a writer/artist’s daybook, describing Paul’s first exhibitions in America, her search for new forms, her husband’s diagnosis of cancer, and the onset of the global pandemic. Paul, who first revealed her talents as a writer with her memoir, Self-Portrait, enters with courage and resolve into new unguarded territory—the artist at present—and the work required to make art out of the turbulence of life.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    April 26, 2022

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781681376417

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781681376417
      • File size: 29499 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      February 28, 2022
      Painter Paul (Self-Portrait) shares her thoughts on art, relationships, and the creative life through letters to Welsh artist Gwen John (1876–1939) in these intimate meditations. Paul explains that she’s drawn to John because of her work, as well as for what they have in common: they’re both painters who attended the Slade School of Fine Art, both were involved with older male artists (in Paul’s case Lucien Freud, and in John’s Auguste Rodin), and both depend on solitude to nurture their art. In periodic entries and correspondence spanning February 2019 to November 2020, Paul reflects on her formative experiences (“My earliest memories are of brightness and freedom”), mortality (“I am terrified of ageing”), and family (“I’ve wondered what it would be like to have a brother”). Paul’s prose is spare and luminous, revealing her painter’s eye in attention to color, texture, and depth, as when she notes the flowers around her cottage “glowing in the grass, the simplest of flower-forms with their four evenly spaced yellow petals; they are interwoven with the stars of stitchwort.” The included paintings, both John’s and Paul’s, are breathtaking. Fellow artists will relish this lucid look at what is required to “live and paint truthfully.” Agent: Jeffrey Posternak, Wylie Agency.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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