Evans is a place on Earth: Celia Paul:Pure/Mourning.

It's 2020! That sounds incredibly futuristic and modern and, in many ways, it is. Smart phones, broadband, climate change, and all the other things people have been banging on about for years are all here now, there's no doubt about it. But poverty, homelessness, sexism, and racism don't seem to have gone away, like they probably said they would on Tomorrow's World. In some countries - like the UK, they've got noticeably worse in recent years.

Just because Brexit is now a certainty it doesn't mean it won't continue to both dominate the news and divide families. So I thought I'd kick off another year (my fifth now) of blogging with a low-key, gentle dipping of the toes in the water, assessment of the artist Celia Paul's recent show at the Victoria Miro Gallery on Wharf Road between Shoreditch and Islington, as well as a few personal thoughts about my life, where it's been, and where it might be going.

My Sisters in Mourning (2015-2016)

Family is at the heart of Celia Paul's work. She was born, in 1959, in Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala, India (a city I visited, for one hour, eight years back. I saw a very busy train station and one of the grimmest bars I've ever witnessed, even I didn't stop for a drink) but, for the most part, she's worked in London. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, had a twenty year relationship, and a son, with Lucian Freud and has had work shown at such august institutions as the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Saatchi Gallery, and the V&A as well as the MoMA in New York and Copenhagen's Carlsberg Foundation.

It seems she's not allowed this impressive CV to go to her head. Her work is still thoughtful, unshowy, and understated. As the unnecessarily laminated sheet of A4 you can pick up on entering the Victoria Miro asserts, it is "familial, creative" as well as "self-assuredly quiet, contemplative and ultimately moving".

The vast bulk of this lovely show is given over to portraiture and landscape but in the muted tones of the paintings, in their stillness, and in their sombre colour schemes it's very clear that these aren't commissioned portraits. These are not made to boost the confidence or ego of the sitter. These are quite different portraits. They dwell, the landscapes as much as the portraits, on something we all do. Something we often wish we didn't dwell on. Mortality.

My Mother and God (1990)

As we get older, as the lucky ones among us all must do, death looms larger in our lives. We lose family members, we lose friends, and our bodies start to slowly fail us. Firstly, for most of us, in small ways (gout for me, a few years back) and then, surely but with absolute sureness, in larger, scarier, more obvious ways. Each minor ailment a signpost as we travel on the (hopefully) long road towards our certain death.

How does an artist contemplate this without depressing us, without filling us with morbidity? I'm not sure it's always possible but, equally, I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing. Life's not all jokes. Last year I attended Tracey Emin's wonderful A Fortnight of Tears show at Bermondsey's White Cube and I wrote, at the time, about how "death is the end for the dead" but how "that's not the case for those that are left behind" before remarking of a painting of Emin carrying a box containing her mother's ashes that it was "an unbearably sad image to ponder".

If Celia Paul's depictions of grief, bereavement, and absence don't carry quite the same almost physical weight as Tracey Emin's scratchy, quite brutal, and often disquieting imagery, they do reflect on other aspects of death. Loneliness, solitude, and those little moments when you have a small thought you'd like to share with a loved one only to realise, yet again, they're gone and you can't. You never will be able to.

Lucian and Me (2019)

2015 saw the thirtieth anniversary of Celia Paul's mother's death and with her father having recently passed too, the artist set about the work that heads this blog up. My Sisters in Mourning. Celia and her three sisters are together, united in their grief but each sister's silent contemplation remains a mystery both to us and to each other. Bereavement can bring people together but it can tear them apart too. It's up to us as humans to respect that everybody handles it differently and to navigate a path through it where those left behind can emerge, after however long it takes, with as little permanent damage as possible.

Art, music, writing, and friendship can all help immeasurably. Celia Paul is an artist so, quite understandably, that's the route she's taken to try to come to terms with her losses. Even the pieces that are devoid of a human presence, Room and Tower (below) for example, have a powerful feeling of absence within them. In fact, Room and Tower is defined, haunted even, by that very absence. It reminds me of some of Edward Hopper's best work and that, of course, is no idle praise.

Room and Tower (2019)

Self-Portrait, Standing (2019)

Santa Monica (2019)

The seascapes, too, are so simple as to border on abstraction. I was fortunate enough, in 2016, to visit Santa Monica and I must say my take on the place was that it was vibrant and fun (and that, if I had enough money, I'd quite like to live there) so it's fair to say that Celia Paul's meditation on the waters and skies there is quite separate to my personal experience.

It does, however, have that quality that water, and the seas and oceans most of all, always have. There's a duality about staring out to sea. The sound of the waves, the enormity of the ocean (and this is the Pacific so it's the biggest of them all), and the endless blue horizons have an ability to help our minds find rest at times of inner turmoil while at the same time remaining a dangerous primal force with the power to dwarf us and even destroy us. People often move to coastal towns as they get older as if in some kind of cruel reverse evolution. Fishes came on to the land and evolved into mammals and eventually us. When it's our time to go many of us, it seems, return to whence we came.

In Front of the Museum (2008)

Breaking, Santa Monica (2019)

Hawthorn Blossom Tree (2019)

Elsewhere in the exhibition there are celebrations of love, architecture, and even new life in the blossom of a hawthorn tree. As if to suggest that this is all quite natural. People and flowers always die but new people and new flowers always appear in their wake. At fifty-one years old I now realise that to create and to nurture a new life is the most wonderful thing any human being can do and I am in awe of all of my friends who have taken on this challenge. I sometimes regret I was too selfish, too disorganised, to do the same.

When I was younger the idea of creating new life would have been horrific to me. I WAS new life! Time passed, things happened, I even got involved, briefly, in being a stepdad but, despite being better at it than I would have expected to be, it wasn't to last. Mostly down to my own failings but circumstantial also. The last decade, decade and a half even, has seen a slow dawning, a realisation, that life is not about the grand gesture, it's not about becoming rich or famous. Instead, the truly important things in life are the relationships we build, small moments of kindness, grace, and charity. Being there for people. Having time for them.

Self-Portrait, Early Summer (2018)

Charlotte (2019)

Emily (2019)

Lucy, Autumn (2018)

Once I was very selfish. Of late I have been much less so. It's not brought me any wealth or success but I do feel happier in my skin than I did when I was younger and, therefore, I endeavour to continue to try and learn, to try to listen more, and when given a choice between being kind and being right to try and always err on the side of kindness.

I won't always get it right and friends and family occasionally will need to tell me so but entering into my seventh decade on this accursed planet I don't want to be one of these people who thinks they know everything, thinks they can lecture younger people on how to behave, or thinks things were better in the olden days.

Times change, sure, but we do too. Twenty to thirty years ago I'd have taken virtually no interest in 'quiet' art like that of Celia Paul but now it speaks to me deeply. Seascapes, country churchyards, trees, and the interior lives of those closest to me have become (not least in my ever growing passion for walking) the subjects that I find myself becoming ever more drawn to. Obviously, that's partly because I'm older and I'm closer to death but it's also because, I think, that in these quiet places of the world or of the mind there is space and time. Space and time to be with both our thoughts and each other.

I haven't entered 2020 with any new year's resolutions as such. Just an ongoing personal project to be the best version of myself I can be and to be present for others. Lives can seem incredibly long things while we're living them but they can reach their ends within what seems barely more than a blink of an eye. It's impossible to do, or achieve, everything we've ever wanted to but what we can do, or at least try to do, is to appreciate the things we do have and many others do not. I have food, I have friends, I have family, I have a roof over my head, and I have access to galleries and art exhibitions as well as a reasonable level of articulacy to write about it afterwards. My life ain't so bad right now.