My Mother Facing is a significant, large-scale work from a mature phase of Celia Paul’s career, which depicts Paul’s elderly mother. The picture conveys a convincing sense of actual physical presence, a quality enabled by its impressive size. The painterly substance of the image registers clearly, at once constituting the body of the sitter and retaining its own material qualities of texture and colour. Smooth, evenly applied vertical brushstrokes structure the picture, richly coloured in a narrow chromatic range that keys with the skin tones and clothes of the mother’s figure. All details of the surroundings – even the chair in which the figure sits – are suppressed, indicated only slightly by small adjustments and additions in the paintwork. An area of shadow to the right of the seated figure provides a subtle but convincing spatial reference, indicating a sense of weight and volume.

Notwithstanding the figure’s reposed grandeur, the execution of the face and arms is fraught. Accretions of impasto in the face suggest an extended period of working and reworking. A depth of subtlety in expression and modelling has been achieved here: the eyes are almost closed and only see dimly, such that the woman seems caught in her own world; the eyebrows are raised and the mouth slumped, suggesting ease and peace. The bulk of this figure is so sensitively evoked that the mark making is indiscernible, with the contours softened and the surface of skin and fabric evinced without obvious patterning.

Paul’s mother is the definitive subject of the artist’s career to date. She started depicting her mother when she became an art student in 1976 and continued to do so until shortly before her mother’s death in 2015. In 2011, referring to life classes at the Slade School of Fine Art where she studied, Paul explained the rationale for depicting her mother: ‘She [the life model] meant nothing to me, so I couldn’t work from her. It seemed important to me to work from someone who mattered to me. And the person who mattered most to me was my mother.’ In her memoir Self-Portrait, Paul described the circumstances in which her mother would sit for her:

She used the time of silence for prayer. […] She would travel down from Cambridge Tuesdays and Fridays to sit for me in my studio in London. She was always anxious about the journey and, very often, she didn’t sleep the night before. […] She would collapse into my battered wood-framed chair in my front room, with her bags scattered all around her.

After settling into a day’s sitting, ‘she entered into the silence with her soul’, Paul wrote. ‘Her faced assumed a rapt expression. My painting was raised to a higher level, too, because of her elevated state. The air was charged with prayer.’ Paul’s family is closely connected with the Church of England. Her father, Geoffrey Paul, was Bishop of Hull and subsequently Bradford, and her sister Jane Williams is an Anglican theologian and wife of the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. It is unclear if Paul herself is a practising Christian, but her paintings are loaded with unarticulated spiritual values.