last one was nearing school age I was itching to paint. I thought ‘Right. My life’s about to start!’ “


Her subject at the time was androgynous human figures: “After having children it was all about the vulnerability of human life. It wasn’t a subject I had deliberately chosen, and yet they were really bringing me down. I was thinking ‘How can I portray these figures without it being so dark? Then I was in Sainsbury’s one day and saw a big crevette – and it seemed just like a curled up figure.”


‘Skies are the hardest things to do: I don’t want fluffy clouds, I want drama.’ She found that by putting green in the sky it became part of the whole landscape. She was till recently ‘terrified of green! If you paint the green of the actual landscape it can look fake, so you have to make up your own’


She bought the giant prawn and spent three days studying it till it stank to high heaven. But the resulting painting was accepted into the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. “I really enjoyed the mechanics of the fish. So I started going to the local West Indian fish markets [she was living in Peckham, south London at the time] where they had exotic things like snapper fish and I’d do studies of them. But it wasn’t till I tried to emulate the whitebait and sardine swimming in a bait ball on David Attenborough’s ‘Blue Planet’ series that they really took off.”


Celia had huge success with her still life fish, finding that having exhibited at the Battersea Art Fair, dealers from galleries would seek her out. After many years, however, she wanted to move


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on. “The fish had a real hold on me: it was as if I couldn’t actually paint anything else.”


She managed to ‘escape’, she says, via a bit of abstract cubism. “I’ve always loved abstract work – my degree show was quite Mondrian. So I started painting in blocks of colour.”


The paintings on show at The Bistro in Ventnor tell the story of her passage from linear control to more abstract freedom. “That one is still very traditional, I haven’t quite let go,” she’ll say. Or “that one seems more abstract but it’s still controlled with the rigidity of the cubism technique.” Her more recent techniques do not in any way invalidate earlier ones. “There are two sides of me – one is very linear but that’s too safe.” Her Hillside painting is a stunning example of using controlled lines to depict the drama of a sheer cliff. Yet her mastery of the abstract is clearly a delight. “It’s quite hard to get the balance right: there are trees and birds so you know it’s a landscape but if you look closely there’s nothing really there.” She is a great admirer of Patrick Heron and Paul Nash and like them seeks a personal language of her own.


The danger of absorbing too much of another artist has often been a worry, not least because her mother was a painter with a very distinctive style. “She always admired Alan Reynolds who taught me at college. He’s very constructivist now but his landscapes are quite wild. She was influenced by his landscapes and I was influenced from the other direction, his abstracts. But weirdly I’ve gone back to what he was trying to say.”


Celia is hugely grateful to have been brought up in such a creative home. Her brother sculpts, her sister designs


textiles and her younger brother is a musician. “Just as well we’ve all got a different artistic niche or we’d be highly competitive!”


Her Island home and the demands of her dog to be walked means she’s always in the landscape and although she never works on location her work retains a spontaneity from her ardent response in particular to skies. “Skies are the hardest things to do: I don’t want fluffy clouds, I want drama.” In Gathering Storm she found that by putting green in the sky it became part of the whole landscape. She was, until recently, “terrified of green! If you paint the green of the actual landscape it can look fake, so you have to make up your own.”


‘Every day I walk the dogs to Windy Corner. Something will trigger me one day and I’ll go to the studio and think ‘That was amazing!’


Cracking the ‘green problem’ was serendipitous – one of her favourite words, because much that has happened in her art career has been a happy discovery by accident.


Words are important to Celia. Harder than skies, almost, is thinking of titles for her art. “I want Stephen Fry to give names to all my paintings – it needs a wordy person. You can actually ruin a painting if doesn’t have the right title.” She hates calling something ‘Untitled’ or ‘Composition 1’.


Actually her titles are rather enticing. Untamed [italic] – “because it’s really wild down there” – and Snow Tickled, because there was just a sprinkling of snow. Unleashed depicts the shimmering light from a sudden split in the cloud, and then there’s Gathering Storm: “when you get that intense green just before it rains.”


The exhibition just staged has given Celia the opportunity to gather a substantial body of her work, and she is exited about her art here and now. “The FREEDOM of painting these rather than the fish is unbelievable! I get butterflies when I go into the studio because I don’t know what’s going to happen – what’s going to come out! I wouldn’t want to do anything else.”


May / June 2012 73


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