Letters to Gwen John
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- USD 14.99
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- USD 14.99
Descripción editorial
A unique combination of memoir and artistic biography, interspersed with original artworks, from the acclaimed artist and author of SELF-PORTRAIT.
We are both painters. We can connect to each other through images, in our own unvoiced language. But I will try and reach you with words. Through talking to you I may come alive and begin to speak.
Celia Paul has felt a lifelong connection to the artist Gwen John. There are extraordinary parallels in their lives and work. Both have always made art on their own terms. Both were involved with older male artists. Both worked hard to keep themselves and the sacred flame of their creativity from being extinguished by others.
Letters to Gwen John is Paul’s imagined correspondence with this groundbreaking painter. These intimate, passionate, haunting letters offer a unique form of memoir and conversation, and an unforgettable insight into a life devoted to making art.
'Beautiful, tender, and riveting. I have taken this book into my heart'
CLAIRE-LOUISE BENNETT
'A beguiling, singular work of art – a portrait of two lives, entwined through time and space'
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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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."