Letters to Gwen John

With original artworks throughout, an extraordinary fusion of memoir and artistic biography from the acclaimed artist and author of Self-Portrait.

Celia Pauls Letters to Gwen John centers on a series of letters addressed to the Welsh painter Gwen John (18761939), 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. Johns 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 Johns 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 publics 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/artists daybook, describing Pauls first exhibitions in America, her search for new forms, her husbands 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 territorythe artist at presentand the work required to make art out of the turbulence of life.