"Jealousy makes love grow"

In the magnificent exercise in fiction in epistolary format that Celia Paul dedicates to the painter Gwen John (1876-1939), I read a letter that the latter wrote to her friend Ursula Tyrwhitt.

She tells him about the pause and the recollection.

Almost at the same time and more than three thousand kilometers away, the painter Helena Westermarck wrote a letter to the also painter Helene Schjerfbeck advising her to work calmly, turning a deaf ear to the opinion of others.

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I am my own subject

I imagine the lives of these women observing the light of northern Europe over a hundred years ago, resolving the atmosphere of a room with fillings of different shades of white.

A chestnut teapot on a tablecloth in a mixture of titanium white, yellow ocher and natural umber earth.

Facing themselves one day after another in the mirror, feeling the passing of time on their skin and matter.

What would they think if they knew about the immediacy with which we contemporary painters deal?

I haven't shown my work for almost three years and I feel that now I belong to a place where everything is built little by little, behind the world's back, that I fell behind in this career that forces us to always be visible and produce in line with the objectives and interests of others, boasting of a torrent of ideas and creative capacity.

I feel,

Searching for silence in the palette of white tones in which I work, I fully immerse myself in the new publication in epistolary format by Celia Paul, the painter who paints the spiritual of the flesh.

I am interested in her leisurely vision of the world and the beauty that she is capable of transmitting with a few spots.

In the first letter, a crying child in the next room breaks through Paul's tenderly somber thoughts: the view of Santa Monica beach from her hotel room makes him think of The Seventh Seal

.

“I think you would have liked Ingmar Bergman,” she writes to Gwen John.

I make progress in reading the English edition, knowing that I will soon have a Spanish translation in my hands, and assuming that I will do exactly the same as I did with his first book (read the English edition once and the Chai Editora translation three times). times more), I know that no matter how much I agree with the author's way of looking, no matter how much pleasure I find reading it, describing how the composition has been resolved in a work, no matter how happy it makes me to find a voice in which I I recognize and who looks at the light as I do, there is something in Celia Paul that always escapes me, that annoys me and makes me uncomfortable, and I think it's a good thing, sometimes I think it's better not to try to understand it.

I am attracted to the movement of his brush on the canvas, a temperance that I envy, and not always agree with it.

"Jealousy makes love grow," she writes, and I sulk because love must be able to be lived in freedom.

"Jealousy creates pain and feeds it, makes mistrust grow", I want to write in a letter that I will never send him.

In her book

Paul rescues a self-portrait of the latter holding a letter stuck to her throat.

Paper is like the cutting edge of a meat cleaver.

It is most likely one of the many letters that John wrote to Auguste Rodin.

Rodin answered only a few of them: he loved her, but he was not the center of her life, writes Paul.

I listen to her talk about the deep love she felt for Lucian Freud (with whom she had an asymmetrical relationship when he was already a respected artist and she was beginning to study painting, like John and Rodin) and, suddenly, her painting Painter and model (

a year after his death) is charged with a new meaning, I see it as a duel that dialogues directly with the

which Freud painted in 1986 and depicted a young painter Celia Paul in front of a male model stretched out on a sofa.

He painted her as a painter, but he was the painter.

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