Recent Work
Biography
Paul Celli was born in Boston, MA in 1935, the oldest of three brothers, to Katherine Connolly and Joseph Celli. Since 2009, he has lived and worked at his home studio in Hollis, New Hampshire.
He holds a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art-Boston (1960) and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (1962). He was an Associate‑Professor then Professor at the Massachusetts College of Art from 1970 to 2000. Prior to his long tenure at MassArt, he was an instructor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the Art Institute of Boston.
He has shown extensively throughout Boston, Cambridge, Providence RI and elsewhere in the Northeast during his extensive career as an educator and working artist. In the 1980s, he published a highly-stylized graphic novel series in black & white entitled Ink Comics. To this day, his past students from his three decades at MassArt look to him for guidance.
Paul's work is largely figurative and deeply rooted in memory of family life in 1930s and '40s Boston but, with the progressive reduction of the subject to the essentials of light, form and negative space, the connection to an individual or specific photograph has grown more tenuous. Nonetheless, the bulk of his work is lifted almost entirely from old family photos, including photo portraiture hand-developed by his father, Joseph Celli, himself an intuitive and sensitive photographer. His non-figurative subjects have included automobiles, empty street scenes and the iconic 'three-deckers,' wooden 3-story multi-family homes unique to Boston's old neighborhoods.
Over the decades, the head and the body of the figure have been subjected to varying degrees of reduction and hyper-simplification. The oftentimes eerie work of the 1970s reduces the body and its appendages to an armature holding up a recognizable head in portrait. In the 1980s much of his focus was on Ink Comics, an almost academic dissertation on his process presented in the form of the comic book, the beloved media of his childhood. Full body presentation and portraiture returned in the '90s and 2000s, and in the late-teens and twenties of this century, the cartoonish impulses of the '80s and the accumulated wisdom of decades of chiseling away at the priorities of form joyfully wrestle with each other on the thick, acrylic-laden, acid-free paper surface.
And with that, every day, he steps into his large, sky-lit studio, custom-converted from a two-car garage, turns on the radio to the Boston classical music station and gets down to the business of painting.
— Peter Celli, August 1, 2026
Artist Statement
My work begins with a single conviction: including more information defeats the painting.
Every decision I make now is in service of reduction — not as a stylistic gesture, but as a discipline. I paint in extremes of light and shadow. One side of the canvas is warm, the other cool; where there are two figures, one belongs to light and one to shadow. Limbs become shapes rather than anatomy. I paint with a house painting brush because it guarantees simplification — there's no room for a fussy edge when the tool itself resists precision. I've come to like losing the edge altogether. I think of it as another reduction.
Color is where I work hardest, and where I trust myself least — I have color perception problems in the red and green range, so I keep mixing codes in the corner of most paintings, a kind of ledger against my own eye. I start with two shades, half one color, half the other. Ideally I work with two colors. I'm happiest with results using three, tops. But I paint nine or so canvases at once, and across that whole simultaneous body of work, I allow myself five colors total, no more.
Every composition is horizontal, and every figure within it is vertical — a built-in tension I return to painting after painting, the frame pulling one way, the body pulling another.
My earlier work doesn't hold up for me anymore. It was set up like pastels — not enough contrast, lacking definition. I was too concerned with setting, and settings are fussy. Once you take a step, you can't go backwards. The figures used to come from family photos; now simplification has taken over so completely that I don't think of them as portraits anymore. I call them zombies. The color has gotten jazzed up — sharper, tighter, three colors tops but with far more contrast, and light and shadow now rendered using the same colors rather than different ones.
I don't buy the old work anymore. This is the only way I know to keep moving forward.
The above was composed from the Artist's quotes as transcribed in real time by Liz Watson on June 8, 2026 and compiled with Claude for Mac.
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