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Paula Rego in her studio wearing a paint-spattered apron and smiling
‘The only thing that helps is the work’: Paula Rego. Photograph: Phil Fisk/The Observer
‘The only thing that helps is the work’: Paula Rego. Photograph: Phil Fisk/The Observer

Paula Rego: ‘It isn’t nice in my mind’

This article is more than 5 years old

Visceral and unsettling, Paula Rego’s art has challenged us for decades. Now, at 83, she talks about cruel fables and the medicinal joy of champagne

There’s a moment in old age when some people become a little girl again, and it’s at this point in her life that I meet Dame Paula Rego, the 83-year-old artist who has always been fascinated by fairytales. “There’s a traditional Portuguese folk tale where a very poor couple have run out of food.” This is her favourite. “The children are crying so the wife cuts off her breast and cooks it for supper. The next day she cuts off her other breast. But on the third day she explains to her husband that there’s nothing left to eat, and he says, ‘We’ll have to start on the children.’” She likes it because it’s “ruthless and terrible,” which are also words that have been used to describe her work, along with comical and visceral and grotesque. She sits, slowly. “I’m very, very old. But I’m an idiot. I feel very young. How old do I feel?” She thinks for a second, her eyes slightly glazed. She smiles constantly. “Eight,” she settles on, firmly.

Paula Rego, who was born into a privileged family in Portugal during a dictatorship (though she was “being repressed and restrained by my mother, not Salazar”), began exhibiting with the London Group in the 1960s alongside David Hockney. She became the first associate artist at the National Gallery and today is one of our greatest living painters. Her themes are power and possession, childhood, and sexual transgression; in The Policeman’s Daughter (1987), a girl polishes her absent father’s jackboot, her fist rammed in deep. She offers me some ginger tea.

The light in her Camden Town studio is warm and dramatic, and falls in angles on rails of antique dresses, a stuffed octopus and a mannequin of a naked child, begging. These are props that have appeared in her paintings over the past 50 years, details in a career that has reflected a life equal parts charmed and painful. And, this is not a comfortable interview. Not because of what Rego says – she is welcoming and delightful – but because of what seems to have been lost, and recently, too.

Interviewing somebody who has become very old very quickly feels both important – gather what you can before it’s too late – and exploitative, and afterwards I take the long way back to work to shake off my discomfort. Folded into her chair, she searches for the correct answers, but when they appear they’re well-worn, photocopies.

Dark arts: Paula Rego’s Angel (1998). Photograph: Paula Rego, courtesy Marlborough Fine Art

I ask her gallery if they’re comfortable with us running the interview. They are enthusiastic and encouraging. They email more responses from Rego (typed by her assistant and muse, her “self portrait” Lila Nunes) and son Nick Willing, the youngest of her three children, sends over unseen footage he shot of her, before she started fading. “Since finishing the film [Secrets and Stories, for the BBC last year] I’ve noticed Mum has become more fragile, forgetful and vulnerable,” he says.

Their relationship has never been easy. His sister Victoria says the children were, “very much the subplot” to Rego’s life. She kept her son at arm’s length, and “regularly excluded me because I was a man and wouldn’t get it. So to finally have her open up to me,” he says, “made me feel loved.”

In 2007, during a particularly bad depression, she did a series of pictures which she locked in a drawer. They were of Lila, standing in for Rego, holding tightly on to “things that do not help”. Though they were cathartic to draw she was ashamed of them, and refused to show them for 10 years, but today her depression is as much a part of her story as the anecdote about how she met her late husband, the artist Victor Willing.

She was studying at the Slade under Lucian Freud (her parents banned her from going to Chelsea School of Art when they heard about another student getting pregnant) when Vic took her into a room at a party and told her to remove her knickers. Many abortions later, when, aged 20, she decided to have a baby, he finally left his wife. Remembering Vic, she says: “Grief is always there, it doesn’t get easier. I thought about falling in love again many times, but that’s nobody’s business.”

Studio props: figures and artefacts that have appeared as details in Rego’s paintings. Photograph: Phil Fisk/The Observer

Abortion, or the promise of it, is another of Rego’s motifs. The aim of her 1998 Abortion series was to campaign for a change in Portuguese law – when they were exhibited, the gallery was full of women whispering.

There is another fairytale Rego likes to tell, about a woman given a magic cake that will make her pregnant. Except, scared it is poisoned, she passes it to her husband, who gives birth to a daughter. “I like the idea of the man having the baby and his gut bursting,” Rego says. “Serves him right.”

The horror of her work, unfashionable for so long due to its painterly naturalism, seems appropriate now, as truths about the female experience are being peeled back, and a return to figurative painting has seen artists use the body to discuss, among other things, the sexist politics of art.

‘I like the idea of the man having the baby and his gut bursting – serves him right’: a shot from the 1960s with Rego, her son Nick Willing (left), two daughters, and late husband, Victor (right).

“Paula Rego’s art has come in and out of focus several times since the early 90s,” says art critic Laura Cumming. “Familiarity may have blotted out her achievements for a while. She was sometimes thought to be a kind of honorary godmother to the YBAs, but in fact her dark and knotted scenarios have almost nothing in common with their eye-popping shockery.”

In her work women are strong but compliant, and they are ostriches, and they are children, scavenging for food, opening their dress to be shot. “Painting pictures is the part of you that’s a man,” Rego told her son. “It has the push, the thrust. Having babies and playing at house is… play acting. While doing a picture you are being yourself.”

Every morning, Lila picks Rego up from her Hampstead home. “I live by the Heath, unfortunately,” she sniffs. “I don’t like nature. I like hotels. Trees are ever so difficult to draw – much more so than a hand.” She sips her tea. “Then we put on opera and draw until lunchtime, when I have a rest.” There is a bed built on a curtained platform near the door, overlooking the naked child and stuffed donkey. Once, visiting the studio, Charles Saatchi saw a model Rego had commissioned her son-in-law to make for her painting of Pinocchio, thus discovering Ron Mueck – the artist’s work appeared in the Sensation exhibition the following year.

For all the tensions, Rego’s is a family business – on weekends, sometimes her grandchildren will sit for her. “I drew Lola as the Virgin Mary. She was 14, the age Mary was when she had Jesus – very young, isn’t it? No, they don’t know I’m a ‘great artist’. I’m Grandma.”

After her rest, Lila will change the music to fado, and she will work, or try to. “But,” she groans, “I have no story right now. I’m a bit dead down there – nothing’s coming. I’m no good. It’s not always easy.” What makes it easier? “Lots of champagne.” At home, every night, she watches a film, having recently given up EastEnders. “Even a bad movie is better than no movie. I save my glass of champagne to drink while watching the film. Then I go to bed and hope not to have too many nightmares.”

‘In her work women are strong but compliant’: Paula Rego’s La Fete, 2003. Photograph: Copyright Paula Rego, courtesy Marlborough Fine Art

In 1965, she said her work was about, “giving fear a face.” As a child she was scared of everything; as an adult she is scared of most things. “The devil, particularly. I saw him when I was… eight. Every Saturday at Fascist Youth they’d say: ‘Never look into a fire, you will see the face of the devil.’ And one night I heard footsteps, the door opened, and death came in. I ran into my parents’ room, but death came with me. So I remained afraid. Today, I still have bad dreams, but think less about death.” She pauses, smiling. “It’s not very nice to live inside my mind. I’d like not to have these dreams every night. I bought a dreamcatcher, but it does nothing to help. The only thing that does, is the work.” Does she ever think about retiring? “No. What would I do? Some drawing I suppose.”

She walks to a chair the photographer has positioned in a vast triangle of light and closes her eyes while he focuses the lens. “Stay just like that,” he says, “perfect.” Willing, who started working with his mother when her Lisbon museum was under threat, stands to help her walk. He says old age has affected her work, but not stalled it. “She’s turning that into pictures, too. The fragility of her line, boldness of colour, directness of the image are reflections of her age, her state of mind. But while her pictures remain powerful, for me personally, I see the giant who makes them losing her strength and becoming scared.” Four clicks later the photographer tells Rego she can open her eyes, and we wait, but her eyes stay closed. There is an uneasy pause. Lila clears her throat. The photographer says it again, louder, and then again, and Rego starts awake. “Were you having a lovely dream Paula?” he smiles. “Yes?” she blinks, unsure.

The Cruel Stories of Paula Rego runs until 14 January 2019 at Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris

More on this story

More on this story

  • Artist Paula Rego, known for her visceral and unsettling work, dies aged 87

  • Paula Rego review – stunning is an understatement

  • Paula Rego: ‘Making a painting can reveal things you keep secret from yourself’

  • Paula Rego’s The Cake Woman: everyday power struggle

  • Paula Rego review – a monumental show of sex, anger and pain

  • Paula Rego calls US anti-abortion drive 'grotesque'

  • Home is where the art is: what Paula Rego, Lubaina Himid and other artists hang on their walls

  • Paula Rego: 'Germaine Greer scared me and the President of Portugal nearly killed me'

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