Celia Paul exhibition, Victoria Miro

Celia Paul is often discussed in relation to the late Lucian Freud: one of his many muses, the painter is also mother to one of his 40 children.

What's really remarkable about Paul, though, is the quiet, restless power that seeps from her canvases. Unlike the stark, acute stillness that characterises the work of her erstwhile lover, her paintings shift with ambiguity, the passage of time and dimming lights.

This autumn, Victoria Miro's Mayfair space will mount an exhibition of Paul's recent seascapes and portraits. Despite their haziness, these work are incredibly intimate. Where Freud would pick subjects up and discard them, Paul paints the same people or things over and over again.

For years, her chief subject was her mother, Pamela. Following her death last year, the artist began a new series of self-portraits, which are marked with grief. In previous work, Paul has depicted herself with a brush in her hand – as creator and agent. For these, she sits with her hands in her lap.

There is a sense of melancholy, but also of some torch being passed down: Paul is now around the age her mother was when she started to paint her, an age at which she says "a woman needs to be looked at."