I didn’t realise how predatory he was (November 19 2012)
Celia Paul the 53 year old British Indian painter who she was taught by Lucian Freud, becoming his muse and having his child named Frank Paul, who is also an artist. In an interview with Matilda Battersby for The Independent Paul speaks about the effect their relationship had on her own work. Battersby states “Lucian Freud said it was “like walking into a honey pot” when he first saw Celia Paul’s paintings. What Paul, who met Freud as her tutor at the Slade in 1978, didn’t realise then, but laughs wryly at now, is that the sweet thing he was taken with was her 18-year-old self, as much as her artwork. “I really didn’t know anything about his womanising,” Paul says. “I didn’t realise how predatory he was.” She later discovered that he’d taken the job as visiting tutor at the famous London art school because his relationship at the time was going wrong and “he wanted to find a new girlfriend”. The teenage Paul was caught in Freud’s spell; and a potent one it proved. …”I was really quite disturbed by his predatoriness. It felt quite complicated, because obviously I was compelled by his art, which I admired so much.” But the 55-year-old Freud, whose mesmerising qualities had at that point already earned him 13 acknowledged children, won Paul over. It took several months for them to become lovers, and two years for Freud to paint Paul. But she would become a significant muse for him in the early 1980s.”
Inspired by Matilda Battersby ow.ly/fmFrE image source Cassone ow.ly/fmFk0
