It seems to me that what you are often drawn to are the half-hidden stories – the stories that we can, as we look at your work, continue to unriddle in our heads. Is it possible to paint a secret?
I think it is. You discover things in the making of a painting. It can reveal things that you didn’t expect. Things you keep secret from yourself.
(The Guardian, 04/07/2021)
Q
THE WHITE REVIEW
— Did you ever write stories when you were younger?
A
PAULA REGO
— I did write one or two, yes, as a matter of fact. I did.
Q
THE WHITE REVIEW
— Why did you stop?
A
PAULA REGO
— Because I’d rather draw them! It’s quicker. When you write your story you know what it’s about — it’s normally about your father or something — but invention comes when you do a drawing. As you are drawing something, it very often turns into something else, and you can go with it. It develops in a completely different way, it’s organic and it’s done with the hand. The hand makes it change and so on. It’s much more interesting than having to think everything.
Q
THE WHITE REVIEW
— Where do you start?
A
PAULA REGO
— You can punish anybody in a picture. In pictures you can punish anybody you don’t like. I didn’t like my teacher, I hated her, so I’d punish her in the drawing. If I did a story it would be too real, not right. In a drawing I could have her beaten up or something. That never stops. What you can do in pictures, that never stops. It goes on until now. I can punish people, or mock – mock – people I don’t like. Sometimes something happens whilst you’re doing the picture that, although you loathe the person you’re punishing, halfway through something happens and you begin to like them. Then there’s something perverse where you begin not to punish them but to praise them. It’s very extraordinary how your mind changes and you go with the picture, something in you comes out when you’re drawing. I did a picture called Salazar — our dictator for forty years, my father hated him. I did a picture called ‘Salazar Vomiting his Mother Country’.
I was doing this picture and suddenly I felt sorry for Salazar. Can you imagine? I mean it’s so perverse. I felt sorry for him. I didn’t change the picture, but the feelings changed. Anything can happen in pictures. That’s good isn’t it?
Q
THE WHITE REVIEW
— Your work always arises out of this desire to punish someone?
A
PAULA REGO
— Well, mock. Which is the same. It could be somebody that you love, and then you don’t mock them, you love them. You can do all sorts of things really. I mean with my husband Vic — he died of multiple sclerosis — towards the end of his life I tried to do something and I did do something. It wasn’t in any way mocking, it wasn’t schmaltzy sorrow, it was just compassion.
I always know the people in my pictures. Very often they take the form of monkeys and bears and all sorts of things. It’s easier if you make them into animals because you can do things to animals that you can’t do to people because it’s too shocking. You can cut off a person’s tail — like in ‘Wife Cuts Off Red Monkey’s Tail’ — which is a form of revenge for her.
Q
THE WHITE REVIEW
— But do you think it’s still very shocking?
A
PAULA REGO
— I don’t think so. He deserves it. He’s drunk too much, he’s vomiting wine. Everybody thinks it’s blood but I say it’s not blood it’s wine. That’s why I used animals, because I could do all kinds of nasty things and get away with it.
(The White Review, 01/2011)
I felt for him [Salazar] a feeling that was not allowed and that, by the way, was not even true in real life, but in painting it was allowed. A painting allows you to feel everything that is forbidden. That is why we paint, because we become aware of things that we had not been aware of before, and we are even authorized to commit outrages.
Paula Rego, cited in El Salto Diario (10/06/2022)
“Pain, physical pain and the erotic side are connected. In these paintings, the girls are in a position that could allow both the penetration of an abortion-performing hand and the penetration of a lover. One and the other are equal. In these paintings the two things are intimately related. They are pictures that tell me a lot. I think it was the best thing I ever did because they are deeply true. The decision to survive, to provoke and the fact of never feeling guilty, never. And we are not sorry because there is no room for that guilt, it is not important. It is a matter of survival. For this reason, it is the only thing I will fight for, because I consider it an atrocity that it is prohibited,” said the painter in the documentary Paula Rego, Stories and Secrets, directed by her son Nick Willing Rego.
Paula Rego, cited in El Salto Diario (10/06/2022)
…
Your curator says that your work is often “concerned with a struggle against domination, both sexual and political”. Would you agree?
Personal and political, maybe. Sex comes into it because it is part of life … I’m interested in seeing things from the underdog’s perspective. Usually that’s a female perspective.
(Studio International, 20/06/2019)
… and so much more.
Paula Rego died this last Wednesday, June 8th.
My favourite themes are games of power and hierarchies. I always want to change everything, upset the established order, substitute heroines and idiots.
Público (09/06/2022)
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For more on Paula Rego, in english, see Art Net News (23/07/2021), The New Yorker (29/07/2021), Map Magazine (09/2021). In spanish, see El Salto Diario (10/09/2022).
The Guardian obituary here.
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