Dearest Gwen, I know this letter to you is an artifice. I know you are dead and that I’m alive and that no usual communication is possible between us but, as my mother used to say, “Time is a strange substance” and who knows really, with our time-bound comprehension of the world, whether there might be some channel by which we can speak to each other, if we only knew how. — Celia Paul*

 

Join Paul and Olivia Laing for a conversation about the artist’s new book LETTERS TO GWEN JOHN, a communication across time with the late Welsh portraitist. See link below for details.

 

 

CELIA PAUL and OLIVIA LAING—LETTERS TO GWEN JOHN

In person and online

Wednesday, April 6, at 7 pm

London Review Bookshop

14 Bury Place, Bloomsbury, London

 

*Celia Paul, Letters to Gwen John (New York: New York Review Books, 2022).

 

 

From top: Celia Paul, 2019, London studio, photograph by Antonio Olmos, courtesy and © the photographer and Victoria Miro; Celia Paul, Letters to Gwen Paul (2022), page layout, courtesy and © Celia Paul and New York Review Books; Celia Paul, Letters to Gwen Paul, cover courtesy and © New York Review Books; Olivia Laing, photograph by Sophie Davidson, courtesy and © the photographer and Olivia Laing.