Nick Willing on Paula Rego

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Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening. Wherever you are in the world,

I am Robert Dyer-Ment and this is TalkArt. Welcome to TalkArt.

Now, today I am in North London and I have made the only way I can describe this is a pilgrimage

to a location which is very important in my understanding and development of art.

And because I'm hosting season 27 by myself, I wanted to really dig deep.

And in a way, pay attention, which is a deliberate phrase, which we'll be exploring later on.

But pay attention to the people, to the artists, to the works that really captivated my imagination

in my teens, particularly when I first got obsessed with art.

And today we are in the studio of the late Polarago, who is somebody that I would describe,

but almost like as a kind of teacher to me, but also the blueprint for what went on to be my

sort of fascination in art and all of the artists that I've bonded with and become friends with

over the years. It always comes back to Polar and to her incredible legacy and body of work.

And we are actually sat in the original studio where from the early 90s she moved here and it's

filled with paintings and drawings and prints and sculptures that she would use as kind of

life models, I guess, in a way. And so many objects and all of the brushes and crayons and pencils

just endless and even perfume bottles. There's all kinds of things here. It really feels like a space

that's been very lived and loved. And if you know anything about Polar's work, you know, every breath

was about making art. And you really get a sense of that in here. I think she even used to sleep

in the room next door to have a break near her library at the time. And honestly, I'm really

emotionally overwhelmed. And today I am feeling fearless because I think that is a word that is often

used when describing Polarago. But when you actually look into it, painting for her gave her a

space to be fearless. But actually there was a lot of anxiety. And in recent works that I've seen

even in Fries London, a Victoria Marrow last October, there was even depression and kind of

a lot of concern for other people's situations around the world during different wars and different

times. And I think right now it's such a timely kind of moment when you think of all the chaos

going around the world and how aware we are of it to come back to Polar's drawings and to come

back to her work because she really was an ally to so many different people and not just as a

kind of feminist figure. But also, you know, she was very concerned about people's welfare and

poverty and all kinds of different social injustice. And I think she's such an important figure that

we really have to remember and keep looking into. And I know over the next few years there's

going to be lots of museum shows. So we're going to have lots of opportunity for that. And today I

am meeting her wonderful son who is a filmmaker, a writer and just a very creative individual himself

who grew up with two artist parents. And I'm really proud and excited to be able to get an insight

into the life and work and particularly the drawings of Polarago. So I'd like to welcome to talk

out Nick, willing. Hi, Nick. Thank you. You're sitting in Polar's chair. I know. I can't believe it.

That's where she sat. I believe she arrived in the morning for breakfast. Yeah. She'd get here every

morning quite early and she'd work throughout the day. She'd take a little nap after lunch.

Then finish about six, seven o'clock in the evening. Have a glass of champagne in that chair.

And off she'd go home. And the only place that she was really happy, I have to admit, is here in

her studio, which she's sometimes called her playroom. Really? It's interesting because the way the

seat is positioned is at the end of a table, but it actually gives her a kind of view of everywhere.

Like you can see through to the next room, but also she's got a kind of table in front which has

all these pencils and crayons and colored crayons and different things. But you feel like she

probably drew here, but also would be thinking about what she was going to do next in the studio.

It feels like quite a powerful position as well and a very comfortable designed,

it's a very stylish chair, actually. Yeah. She'd mostly eat here. Oh, really?

This is where she'd have a lunch and her breakfast and her snack in the evening and her glass of

champagne. So you just took me around and there's a number of drawings here that are going to be in

the forthcoming show at Victoria Miro, which opens in the middle of April and runs in

until the end of May. And maybe we should start there with drawing. It seems very apt considering

that her actual pencils are in front of me. Why was drawing so important to your mother?

She once said to me, I'm a drawer. She said, making up a new word, which had an extra R in it.

I'm a drawer. Your father's the painter. I'm the drawer. And I think that was because she

understood, figured out everything, almost everything in her life through drawing.

And it was the way that she could process her feelings, could understand the world around her,

and also understand people. You'd be a bit scared if she decided to want to draw you,

because you don't know exactly what she might find out. It was quite unnerving.

And she drew me obviously many times as she did my sisters. She'd always find something

that I hadn't expected her to find. And often she wasn't even aware that she was discovering these

things. It's almost instinctive that she'd get into your soul through drawing. So she was a very,

very good drawer. And one of the reasons I think that she chose pastel, soft pastel, not oil

pastel, but chalk pastel in the early 90s. And that became her medium of choice throughout her

life was because it was a sort of drawing. She would say that you could draw paintings,

it's how she would describe it, because it would have all the colour and the detail, but it was her

way of drawing. It's really interesting to think about her interest in telling stories as well.

And I heard that drawings were often the place that she would explore different stories. And

she would even request from you and your sisters like if you would come to see her in the studio,

she'd be like, if you've got any stories, you can tell me. Yeah, she was a story junkie. She really

was. She grew up with stories. That was her way of escaping the world, I think, escaping her life,

was escaping her difficulties, but also her way of understanding the world around her. She had

her grandmother. She had an aunt called Teolugera who was a brilliant storyteller that would start

a story in the morning. Keep it going throughout the day. It would change and develop. And then she

could keep it going on for days and weeks if necessary. She would ask you, what kind of story do you

want, Nutella? Oh, I want a story about an adventure, a young girl on it, and off she'd go creating

incredibly imaginative stories for a very young poorler who then grew up absolutely addicted

to stories and storytelling. And when she went to the slay at a very young age, she came to London when

she was 16, she went to the slay when she was 17, in 1952. And she continued to do storytelling or

narrative pictures, which was very unfashionable at the time. And she was scolded for it by the

her professors. That was not what you should do. They were obsessed with used and road painting

in those days. Right. You know what that is? You have to measure everything. You're new,

close, great exponent, friend of the ballers, lovely man. She was more interested in how pictures

could tell stories. So she was very much against the grain in that sense. But one of the things I

think that marks her storytelling apart from other narrative paintings is that although she starts

with a classic story, Jane Eyre, for instance, or a Dickensian story or a Portuguese story like

Badram, Father Amara, as she's making the pictures, the story starts to change. And she lets it go,

she lets it change. And she follows wherever it takes her. And as she's making it, she starts to

realize that the reason it's changing is because it's becoming about her and her life and perhaps

a memory or a trauma from her childhood that hasn't been properly processed and needs to be

re-evaluated and looked at again and painted and painted and painted. And that's how a lot of her

most powerful paintings come about because although we think we're looking at Jane Eyre or Father

Amaro, they have a certain kind of strong authenticity about them that comes from actually

felt experience. I always saw your mum and also your dad as kind of very brave in a way,

almost like explorers. And I know your dad described the role of an artist to you. You've written

a really beautiful essay for the new catalog that's coming with the show at Victoria Mirror about

drawing. But it was this idea of them kind of as adventurers or explorers. And I was thinking about

how brave your mum was in many ways. But she was encouraged to go to the slade to leave Portugal

by her father and her family. Like they were actually quite like supportive of the idea of her

being an artist. But he knew that she couldn't do that in the country where she'd been born and

raised. That she had to go out into the world and explore. And maybe that was London or maybe

it was somewhere else. So do you think she had that within her this kind of like bravery or do you

think it was really encouraged by her father? Because I thought that was such a beautiful thing.

Mum would have told you she's not brave at all. Really? She would have told you if she was sat here

where you're sitting, that she's a coward. Right? Accepting her work. In her work, she could do

anything she would say. But in life, she was not that way. She was brought up as you say in Portugal

during a fascist dictatorship of Salazar. And she was more 1935. So that's a few years after the

start of the Stadnour which was the fascist name that Salazar gave the country. And basically

women became second or even third class citizens. Their place was in the home. They were not

encouraged to work. They couldn't leave the country without the permission of their husband or

father. They couldn't travel without their permission. They couldn't open bank accounts. They

couldn't buy homes. They couldn't do a lot of the things that we take for granted nowadays.

Because they weren't encouraged to work, but encouraged to stay at home, look at after the

children, cook and look after their husbands. It was not my grandfather told my mother. It was not

a country for women. It was not a country that treated women fairly or regarded women in any

way at all, really. So he was an Anglo-File. He had worked for the British Secret Service during

the war, even though he was in Portugal, which was a neutral country. He helped Britain. He had

studied in Britain at Marconi. He spoke English fluently. And so he knew that England was a much

fairer at that time, much fairer country for women. So he said you should go to England. He

sent her to finishing school when she was 16. And then when she wanted to go to art school, he

let her. He was quite an extraordinary man for a Portuguese man of that time because he believed

that women were equal. That sounds ridiculous to think that that was the thing now. But in Portugal,

they were not equal. And he wanted her to thrive, encouraged her to do whatever she wanted to do,

which in itself was extraordinary. And then when she chose to be a painter, he knew that she was

talented. Seeing her work as a little girl, he knew that she could do it. So he encouraged it

and supported it financially. And that was very important because she ended up with another

artist and the two of them were broker than a broke thing. He helped fund them until he died in 1966.

Then they were cut loose and on their own. They had to make their own way and that was difficult.

I was really interested as well thinking about somebody who grows up in one country and then you

move to another country. And when you're an artist in particular, making work in a different culture,

you can kind of look back and have a different perspective on the society you grew up in.

Because in a way, you've been freed from it, like you're no longer living that every day experience

anymore. And I know that also helped her to develop as an artist because she was really interested in

looking back to Portugal. And she had a presence of pride of the culture there and she loves

her family there and all that kind of stuff. But like, but actually living in the UK gave her a

kind of distance from that reality that allowed her to be free to make her work and maybe to be

bolder in the work. She used to say that she couldn't paint in Portugal because there were

too many ghosts there. That there were too many ghosts looking over her shoulder. But in Britain,

she said, oh, there's less magic here. Really? And I think what she means by that is that it's a

country of rationality. It's a very sort of a bane, logical, legalistic country.

Whilst Portugal felt like it was a country founded on witches and magic, which is still

existing Portugal in the north. Interestingly, they have a festival every year of witchcraft.

It's a country full of strangeness and odd dreams and Paul have found it very difficult to work there.

But here, she could look back not so much on the country itself, although she also did that.

But on her experience growing up in that country and her childhood, the things that she was exposed

to, the things that she had to continue to understand and process. And those included her depression

that you mentioned. She suffered from depression all her life. Which is one of the reasons she

described herself sometimes as a coward because she was always afraid. And that fear was the term

that she used to describe her depression, even as a little girl of four or five she remembers

feeling terrified to even go outside. And throughout her life, she struggled with depression.

Because some people think, oh, you need that kind of suffering to become a good artist.

Right. So it's a famous thing, you know, Van Gogh wouldn't be very often as he was, you know,

man. So I asked her, oh, mum, if you could choose between being a great artist and not having

depression, which would you choose? She said, oh, that's easy. I choose not having depression.

And so that gives you an idea of how much it affected her. And art in a way was her method of

trying to alleviate that suffering, that depression. She said, it wasn't, you couldn't exercise it.

It just made you feel better about yourself if you made a good painting. It didn't cure the

depression, but it helped you cope with it, you know? Yeah. Poor thing. I did, she had long, long

spells, sometimes two or three years of shutting down and really suffering. I have always taken

a real strength from her paintings, from her art. And it's interesting to think that in a way,

the work that she made helps other people to kind of hold on. And I think in the way the world

is going every week, because we're so much more aware of all these catastrophes that perhaps

have always been going on actually, but they seem very extreme at the moment because it's all

being livestreamed. I think it's really amazing to have art that can kind of encourage people to

hold on and to know that there are other people like you in the world. And I think I always saw her

as this kind of, almost like, they're almost like talismanic kind of objects her paintings.

But it's interesting that behind that was this very vulnerable anxiety ridden in a way,

person who had a lot of joy from the making and doing. But the objects themselves became

these very strong figures, even if it was the darkest of topics, like backstreet abortions,

for example, which, you know, became a series. But like, there were lots of very dark,

all, you know, themes in the work constantly. But at the same time, there was a defiance and a

strength in these women, in these figures that we as viewers can then gain strength from.

Absolutely right. And there's a lesson very there that I had to learn as a filmmaker.

Most important lesson, I think, that I learned from my mom is that she didn't try to make pictures

for what we call universal reasons, you know, she's not trying to connect with people

in a universal sense. She's not, in fact, making pictures for people for others. She's making

pictures to try to get to grips with something inside her. And in so doing, she needs to focus on

something very specific, very nuanced, very particular, very contradictory in her psyche.

Who knows who would identify with that? It's so kind of weird. And in so doing,

she makes a picture that we all understand. And we go, yeah, and it becomes universal.

And so the biggest lesson I had to learn was if you want to connect with a lot of people,

be yourself, pick on the things that you really understand and know. And don't try and cater

to some kind of common denominator that you think exists amongst lots of people. But just focus

on that, which is true to you in your work. She didn't even have that kind of intellectual

idea. She was just following her instincts in a way. In certain cases, like the abortion

pictures, it's a bit different because that was a referendum that was held in Portugal in 1999

in order to see if the country would approve the legalization of abortion. And Paula had grown up

with abortion being a dark shadow, or rather not abortion, but backstreet abortions being a dark

shadow. She believed that this was a public health issue and that it should be, of course, legal

and performed in proper clinics by proper doctors and not by, you know, backstreet abortionists

with knitting needles and the like. So she was very excited about this referendum. And what happened

was that the Prime Minister at the time, which, who was Antonio Cuterres, who now is the Secretary

General of the United Nations, he was Prime Minister of Portugal in 1998. And although he allowed

the referendum to go ahead, he headed the no campaign. Paula never forgot him. Because he said he was,

it was to do with his Catholic religion. Well, Paula didn't believe it. You know, public health

issues should be having complicated with religion. So what happened is he, he put it on a very

warm day, hot day in June, everyone went to the beach, women were too embarrassed to vote,

and my mother was furious because not enough people voted to pass. You see, air was a threshold

that you had to meet her, the percentage of people that voted and not enough people voted. So

she was so, I remember seeing her that Sunday, she was so furious, mostly with Portuguese women,

because she didn't expect the men to ever do anything properly. But the women should know better

that backstreet abortions will always happen. If you criminalize abortion, it will happen anyway.

It's, you know, you can't stop people having sex. It's just absurd idea. So she embarked on a series

of pictures that she described as propaganda, which were of girls, young girls, mostly school girls

in their school uniform, something she remembers herself well from the fifties,

recovering from backstreet abortions. There's no blood. It's not gruesome. What you feel

is the agony, but also the defiance. These are women who are survivors. They're not victims. They're

doing what they feel they have to do to survive. And that is something which we later discover

comes from personal experience at the time. She denied that she had had an abortion because she

knew that in Portugal, the press would latch on to that and minimize her effort because,

oh, it's just the personal experience of an art. She said, no, it's about what's happening to

everybody. Right. So she didn't want to confuse it, but she did have many abortions as it turns out

later. And that's why those pictures are so fresh and powerful is because they come from a real

place. And I heard a really interesting sort of fact, which was that in America, they tried to

adopt her images almost to kind of go the other way. So instead of using her intention, which was

to legalize abortion, there was some organization in America that tried to use her images to say

like abortions are bad. We have to cancel them and stop them. Yes. And then she was really furious

about that and managed to stand up for the meaning of her work. Well, because she owns the copyright

of the pictures, there was a magazine that contacted me as it was because I was running her archive

then already. This is shortly before she died, 2021 or 22. And there was a magazine that asked if

they could reproduce one of her abortion pastels in Texas, just when they had criminalized abortion

again, you know, Roe v. Wade had just been overturned. So I asked, oh, can I have a look at the

article? And it was an article basically against a bush. So I asked mom, oh, I know mom, you always

say, let people do what they like with the pictures. But in this case, they want to use your picture

against a bush. And she said, oh, no, no, darling, that's not what they're for. So she said, no,

they can't have the picture. And now we're always very careful to check because we get, oh, at

least 15, maybe 20 reproduction requests a week for pictures in books, magazines, and the like.

And probably 20, 30% of those requests involve the abortion series. Interesting. I think it is very

interesting to me what I'm seeing happening now with regard to mom, Paula's work because we have

had requests for more museum shows than ever before. We have between now and 2029, which is the

next three years, 32 museum shows unbelievable in major museums throughout the world. And what I'm

seeing when I'm asking, I'm wondering what the hell happened? Why is there such an interest in her

work? And what curators and museum directors are telling me is, well, there is no really other

artist that speaks to the toxic nature of what is happening today as does the work of Paula Ragan.

She covers more psychosocial political, psychological issues and themes than almost any other

artist I can think of as well as exploring fairy tales and children's stories. And it's such a

vivid and rich world that kind of speaks to all the psychotic things that are happening now.

And it means that museum directors can speak of the themes and subjects that they want to speak

about through her work. What we're witnessing or what I'm witnessing is something I had not expected

to happen, which is Paula becoming even though she's a woman. Because in the art well, being a woman

was not as favorable as being a man. Obviously it's the most one of the most still one of the most

misogynistic and sexist of the arts medium. But what we're witnessing is Paula becoming a legacy

artist. In other words, she's transcending from a contemporary artist to being somebody that even

after her death still has relevance. And that means she's going to join the big guns like

Frances Bacon, even Picasso. I agree. In being an artist that people want to show.

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You kindly took me on a tour around the archive and I got to see a fabric sculpture

which is from the 60s I believe. And it was hand embroidered by your mum. And it's basically a

like a fig or a fig leaf with it which obviously has its own connotations of kind of Adam and Eve

like nature and how nature can look like body parts. Can you speak a bit about that work? Because I

was blown away by its intensity and it's kind of weight as a sculpture considering it is

technically textile art. And what at the time was seen as women's work. That's one of the reasons

you made that in 1969 because as you say in those days textile art was referred to by the

art world as women's work. Yeah. In other words it was demeaned on the ladder of art history

importance. It was at the bottom being women's work. So there were a group of female artists at

that time in the late 60s and early 70s. Mum was one of them who chose to make women's work

as a form of protest for the fact that they're being considered women's work. And so she made this

giant fig. It's about a foot and a half long and a foot wide. It's a sculpture that is beautifully

embroidered. She did a lot of textile work and embroidery work in those days for this reason.

But this is a particular fig that's never really been shown. I've only ever shown it once because

although it's a fig it's also something else a part of a woman's anatomy. And so she

embroidered all the areas of sensation and it's a form of protest in the sense that saying you

want women's work here, you got me. Which I love that. I'm going to show it in this exhibition

of drawing because the exhibition we're doing at Victoria Moe which I've called story line

two words story line because she tells story through the way she draws her line. And embroidery

was a form of using line through thread. Yes. And she draws with that thread. And it's I think

people get a kick out of seeing that because she uses line in a way in every single medium she uses

it slightly different in order to best tell the story that she wants to tell. And the exhibition

we're doing is unique. We've never shown this many drawings. And it's important because as I

said earlier drawing was her way of understanding the world herself getting to grips with things.

She'd draw it. She didn't understand some things she'd draw a picture. Often she wouldn't know

why she was drawing that picture but as she drew it she'd find out or sometimes she'd look back

and she'd realize oh that's why I drew that picture. It's the funny thing that. And this is an

exhibition that tells the story of her life through her drawing. So it starts with the drawings she

made of her grandmother when she was six years old. And it ends with a picture of her as a grandmother

just before she dies of her granddaughter. And in between we see all the various mediums, experiments,

stories that she tells throughout her life. And that's one of the best ways I think of understanding her

life is through her drawing. So we've very carefully picked drawings that express what she's going

through at that moment. And also it's really interesting when you think of Paula's drawings in

terms of how ideas are formed. And you were showing me in the archive as well, all these photographs

that she used to take. Every time she would make a painting at the end of the day she would take a

photograph and then print it out and she would have this kind of archive of how the painting had been

constructed. So as the work would evolve you see figures completely change shape or you know

things are hidden that might have been underneath. So you see all these different layers. And I saw

a real parallel to the way that she drew because I heard when she drew she might start off with a

story or an idea of who she's drawing. But slowly the drawing has its own life. And you almost get

a kind of sense of fiction as well. There's some sort of like you know, because folklore is such a big

part of her interest and fairy tales, which are also kind of truths but they come out of a fiction.

There's a relationship in her drawn line to how this fiction would start to evolve. And then right

at the end she's like what is that? And suddenly it's telling her a truth that she hadn't even

consciously understood until she'd made that drawing. But I found that parallel between the paintings

and the drawn line. So important in her work. Well you put it very well. That's exactly what I think

what's happening. She also took photographs because she wanted to see what the picture looked like.

It's a funny thing. When you're making a picture you're so involved. I should know because she'd

tell me this over and over again. You get so sort of lost and involved in what you're doing.

But sometimes you can't see the wood for the trees. So what she would do is take a picture of it

and then she carried it in her purse and she'd take it out as if to surprise herself she'd go oh no

hang on that's wrong on the left. Sometimes when I write a piece I look at it reread it reread it

reread it on my computer and it seems okay but it's not until I've printed it out and look at it

in a different format that I see all the mistakes. And I think that's what she was doing. She was

taking photographs of something so that she could see what it looked like you know smaller and

I mean for us it's incredibly important because we see the evolution of a picture. So we use that

not only to establish provenance of a picture but we also use it in case we need to do any

restoration work you know so we can see how a picture evolved and what needs repairing why

that happens quite a lot nowadays with some of the earlier work from the 50s and 60s.

It's so interesting as well thinking about invention and innovation in your mum's seven decades

of making work particularly through the drawings because she was using different materials to make

drawings so in every kind of five to ten years it might shift and there might be like a different

material that comes in so you have like ink pen at one point you might start off with a kind of

more traditional pencil but it kind of evolves. I sort of found that really exciting if you think

about the innovation and invention of ideas in terms of being an artist and how artists are always

looking to the next frontier a bit like that idea of your mum and your dad as explorers again

but like how even in the simplest drawing it always felt like she was trying to get exactly

the right material to talk about the subject matter that in hand at that time or in that decade.

How significant do you think that is? I mean it's quite a simple observation in a way this idea

of just the materials that create the drawing but I really noticed it in the body of work that your

mum contributed. There are many ways to look at that. The first way is that drawing for her was a

physical process that involved the whole body. It was a form of concentration. When she drew when

she started drawing as a small child she made this nose like this as she was drawing and when my

her mother heard that coming from her room she knew that she'd be fine for two or three hours.

Wow so she was like okay she's drawing and she's in a trance. I want to ask is it a trance that

you're in and she says no darling I'm just drawing but she did that throughout her life. In fact

I came to the studio a few months before she died and she was drawing and she wasn't making that

sound and I thought oh shit wow she didn't know she was making it but it was so loud and so much

part of her we just associated that as being who she was and when she lost that we thought she'd

lost something and then of course she died a few months later. Drawing for her was a physical

experience it was like entering a kind of different psychological world. It's not a trance because

she's completely concentrating and she's alive and aware. Her whole body is involved in the process

one of the reasons she loved pastel so much is because everything you know from the toes

up throughout the body are part of the drawing process and then throughout her life

she needed to find the right medium in order to tell the story appropriately of that moment

and that might be charcoal right at the beginning with the early dog women and animal drawings

early 1950s through to wash pen and ink in the 60s and 70s she was always doing other things as

well are the drawings and then she in the 80s starts to draw with a brush and she does huge drawings

that are really paintings I suppose but they're not paintings as we might regard them because

she's drawing with a line it's just that that line is comes from a brush and then she eventually

finds pastel if she tried pastel in the 60s it wouldn't have worked to tell the stories that

she needed to tell in the 60s so in a sense I don't see this as an evolution rather that she is

finding the right medium for the right story at the right moment that might be charcoal in one period

pen and ink in another pastel in another the pastel when it comes is a search

for a greater sense of naturalism and what is interesting about it is that in 2003 when she's

making a pastel about the Iraq war she's seen a photograph in the garden of a girl screaming

running towards the camera and she's wearing a party dress like your six-year-olds gone to a party

she's dressed as a princess you know as they do and behind her is a mother stand by the side of the

road with a glazed shocked expression holding a baby and mum saw that picture she thought

oh she looks exactly like my cousin Manuela the girl running in the 50s when she was 40s

you know when she was the six-year-old it brought it home it made it so familiar made it so familiar

so she's still I want to do a picture about the Iraq war somehow and then she thought about it

and she realized that she didn't want to make it with real people because she felt that would be

too sentimental she said I think what she meant was that it would be sort of melodramatic right so

she said oh I'm going to I'm going to make it about rabbits I use rabbits so she made these rabbits

out of papier-mache these rather grotesque and beautiful rabbits and covered them in blood you see

because you can do anything to rabbits she said you know they're the epitome of the cute and

ugly thing and yet we kill them and eat them and we don't care if they're covered in blood well

maybe we do sometimes so you get a sense of the human banality of violence through the death

of a rabbit so she made these great papier-mache rabbits and then covered them in blood and then

she drew them and the pastel being quite naturalistic looks like the dolls but there is a sort

of distance because it's drawn so beautifully so you get this effect odd effect in this it's now

quite a famous picture it's in the tape it's called war and it's made in 2003 it's still quite

shocking to look at because you get a sense of war in a way that you don't through the images we see

in on the television the photographs we see in the newspaper there is an expressive quality in

that painting that covers odd feelings of war that you don't get from those other images and so in

then she started to become more and more interested in these dolls she called them Bunekoshe

it's the Portuguese word for dolls Bunekoshe started making lots of papier-mache dolls which I first

saw in 2010 in the Foundaling Museum as a group exhibition that Tracy Mn are different who also

was taught by Paula I believe and it's really hard to find any information about that because

Tracy's mentioned it to me personally that she was taught by Paula but when I googled it

last night and I was like did she teach her because it's no it's not really documented anywhere

but then I found it in the press release for that 2010 Foundaling Museum show where it says she

was taught by her so I was glad my memory was correct where did she teach her by the way

was it the role college about yeah was the role college mum taught at the role college for a while

she thought she was so interesting this it's very interesting this because she had quite a low

opinion of herself she always said I'm a terrible teacher I'm a terrible teacher I'm awful

I only tell people what they want to hear I wanted to make a film about Hugh Locke who's an artist

I absolutely admire so much me too we interviewed Hugh on the podcast I adore him I think

amazing human beings and great artists and I started making a film about him just before the

you know the procession that he wanted to make a film then I started to make filming and I did

it interviews and he told me a story that when he was in art school down in the south west he made

very realistic intricate painstakingly painted landscapes can you believe it and I said all right

happened he said well I was visited one day by a tutor who started asking questions about my childhood

and I said oh well it's funny you should ask about my childhood because I've started to dream

about my child and the tutor said oh that's you're you telling yourself to paint that

and he said the next day I started to become Hugh Locke no and that visiting tutor was Paul

Arrego you only visit him once he tells this story so magnificently and I was like wow that's so

weird because Paul are always used to say oh no I'm a terrible teacher but everybody I've met who

was taught by her was inspired so she just had a low opinion she had low self esteem you know

but in the essay you've written about the show you you talk about how your mom and your dad sort

of made you pay attention there was this phrase pay attention and it really stuck out to me because

that's actually how I feel about your mom's work I feel like it's her work that sort of made

me stop still in my tracks and sort of think about art in a different way and then of course

free to Carlo was another early formative experience for me but Paul's work was so specific because

it was so detailed that you had no choice when you're looking at her work but to pay attention

because she's trying to tell you things maybe not even deliberately it's just coming out subconsciously

in the work she's got so many layers and I know she described them particularly when drawing

about secrets and I really wanted to chat to you about this idea of the secret because I think

it's such a poetic way of thinking about drawing about revelation and how the truth can come

out of essentially something that is a fiction because you're drawing something it's artificial

in a weird way even though it's totally authentic because it's coming from the body but it's

still a construction and I loved this idea of secrets when I was a kid I used to draw with mom

that's how we connected through drawing together and that was some of your happiest memories both

of your memories it was the funniest memories right because I got appendicitis and I was very very

badly ill in bed in Portugal this was when I was eight years old and it was late at night evening

and mom came up tipsy she was always tipsy and took no notice and then my grandmother said

oh I think he's very ill so off I went to the hospital and I had acute appendicitis anyway

what happened was that the doctor also was drunk when he operated me and he was

they is the Portuguese hospital in the 60s early 70s anyway the point was I had to stay in a hospital

for two weeks and my mom stayed with me which for me was like incredible because I never saw her

really she was always in London I was brought up in Portugal by the grandparents I think she

felt a bit guilty because she hadn't paid attention you know I could have died if it had burst

my appendix and so she stayed with me the whole time she put a bed on the floor and slept next to

my hospital bed and the whole day long we drew together and I've got these sketchbooks we did

comic books together and I would draw one picture and then she would draw another one

as they're a bit better than mine what she discovered was that if I laughed it was very painful

because I had stitches in my tummy so she'd make me laugh all the time

and then I stopped it the weird pleasure she got from seeing me in agony but laughing she thought

it was so extraordinary so we drew the two weeks together and what would happen when you drew

with her is that you would use drawing to make fun of people that you didn't like to find out

things about yourself that you didn't like to draw all sorts of complicated things but those were

your secrets you see you're sort of drawing the thing to bring it out to understand it better

but you keep it a secret so nobody knows that you're this horrible person

I mean that's how I understood it as a child and then later when I went to boarding so they put

me in a boarding school in England but I don't know if you know any English people but they're

horrible and there were a lot of English boys there it was I'm Welsh luckily

even though I grew up in England well you dodged the bullet and I was bullied for being a

Portuguese it was very ugly as well and a runt and I had braces and horrible things so I was very

badly bullied and I'd call home and mum would say we'll draw a picture of them and send them to

me and then I'd send them to her and she would draw things on them and send them back and then

she said now draw them getting you killing them your bullets so I draw that you see those are

your secrets that you're drawing but you're also there your anxieties your fears their

your neuroses they're all the things you're shadow as you would call it you draw now in Paul's

pictures that develops in a very sophisticated way it's always instinctual it's not something that

she's intellectually driven to explore it's something that she just feels she has to do you see

so she starts drawing a picture of God knows what and then she realises that the reason she's

interested in that story is because it's reminding her of a terrible feeling she hasn't really

come to terms with yet and that's the secret so she starts to draw that as well and the picture

and the story changes in order to accommodate the secret so Paul Aurega pictures are always

filled with lots of different sometimes conflicting emotions just like life and they're a mixture

of a story that you can understand Hans Christian Anderson for instance and a story that is her

personal secret I also have always responded to these kind of tales that she will tell almost like

moral guidance which you might have been told from a higher authority at some point but how

they're kind of subverted or the moral tale is somehow turned on its head within her work and

you were showing me a drawing in the other room with a load of pigs and there's a woman in these

fine you know very fancy dress and it was this more moralistic tale of kind of value and you know

material things and how how we can get overwhelmed by material things you know it's a story by

Hans Christian Anderson she's making this drawing in 1969 and it's a story by Hans Christian

Anderson about a princess that gets expelled by her father the king and then rejected by

her suitor the prince because she is too interested in material things she falls for a trick where

her prince makes her a teapot that when the steam rises it plays her favorite tune and she says

all what you want for this and he says a kiss so because she kisses him for the teapot she's expelled

and what Hans Christian Anderson is teaching women is not to be materialistic but mum thought that

was nonsense and so she has the expelled princess wearing a giant shawl that's actually a spider

a giant spider she's got on her shoulder and that giant spider of course is a symbol of creativity

spider is also mother because of the web it's creative and she is standing in amongst a herd of

pigs stories called the swine herd Paula what she has done is she's made a story about

the survival of the princess dad and the prince can sod off I'm going to be fine I have my creativity

and my future and in a way what you're seeing there is a kind of what we now call manifesting

which is if you draw it it might happen there was a scent sometimes with Paula when she was

telling me to draw my bullies that they're drawing had a kind of magical spell about it that could

change the world your world at least it certainly changes the way you think about the world so maybe

that magic is true in that sense but she had a sense or if something was horrible happening to you

and you tell oh mum this terrible thing happened to me and today she said oh let's draw it

I'm going to draw it for you darling then she'd give you the drawing and you you have a sense that

that was kind of a a witch's spell that was going to change your fortune it's amazing and now

I look at that picture of the swine herd and I think she is trying to change her own circumstance

because her father had just died he had abandoned her in a sense just like the swine herd princess

and her husband the prince had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and was very

also he was kind of out of the picture so she was on her own you see so she's making a picture

that's what I would call the secret it is a story and the story we all know by Hans Christian

Anderson but it's also a picture about her circumstance and how she's going to use the

circumstance of the princess to impact on her situation you actually also showed me an original

next door it's of her mother passing away in you know in the stages of her severe illness before

she passed away but you see Paula sat on a chair next to her mother and she's this much bigger

almost like a giant figure sitting next to her very frail smaller almost like withering away

kind of like disappearing mother who's lying down next to her but it's a really interesting

work because it's a print that was made with with films where where Paula would paint and draw

lines onto a film that then got turned into a screen print which I would call an original print

that's why I use that term because it's not a reproduction it was actually made to be a print

but it looks like a unique work on paper and it is so beautiful but it's the defiance she's

about to lose her mother and this intense grief and loss but there she is this strong and larger

presence in that work I was so struck by I'd never seen that work before there's a chair the

Alice in Wonderland chair or I made a film of Alice in Wonderland in 1998 yeah nine for Universal

Pierce and NBC we shot it at Shepton and when we were finished you know they smash up everything

that you all the sets we had seven stages those days you made things probably was before sort of

computer graphics and one of the things we had is we made an oversized chair for the tea party

for Alice to sit in so that it would look a bit more like the tenel drawing you know the famous

tenel of grumpy Alice sitting in that oversized armchair and I gave that armchair to mum

and it's appeared in lots of pictures and that's one of the pictures she's sitting there this giant

oversized armchair and next to her as you say is the withered mother her withered mother she had

just put her in a home in in highgate and she was very very old and she couldn't look after her

herself so she put her in this care home in in highgate and that of course made a feel guilty

but made a feel also liberated you see it's the conflicting emotions that make the picture yeah

and on the one hand you feel terrible about doing what you're doing but you also think thank God

I'm not doing it anymore but then there's it brings up feelings of how you're going to feel when

she dies I mean it's your mother will I feel horrible and grief stricken or will I feel liberated

and then she also starts to think oh I'm right behind her this is the body that I shall become

yeah in not that long and so there are all these complicated emotions about putting her mother

in a care home and how she really feels about her mother at that moment and then it brings up how

she feels about her mother historically throughout your relationship with your parents changes

all the time doesn't it as you're growing old with them and they're growing old with you

and so this is a picture that explores those complicated feelings and that's her way of trying

to deal with them we had a very very very old friend who was just part of the family called

Bath Mill Seat Sunch Portuguese man who was brilliant printmaker Bato we called him Bato he lived

in also in Hampstead brilliant printmaker and he taught at the Slade and Paula used to make

prints with him when he was dying she was called to go see him and their mutual friend Luis

Sorsor was there and he said oh he was talking to Bato it was very very old and he don't run and

Paula was drawing him he said what do you do he says oh I'm sorry sorry she couldn't help it

it's the only way she understands something really is by drawing it I have that drawing it's a

beautiful drawing for Bato and then she makes a model of Bato which we've got over there and then

that model appears in all sorts of pictures and so he lives on in her mind even after his death her

relationship with this man who's just a friend but an important friend continues on you see it's

interesting because if you think about your own role in your mum's legacy now because you have

so much knowledge really precise factual knowledge that was partly why I was so excited to meet you

because I think your passion for your mum and your dad's sort of legacies of all the work they made

making sure it's all factually correct so that when you're no longer here the world will have an

accurate resource and I was really moved by that story of your mum drawing you and painting you

after your father had died and how interconnected your own grief was after your father had died

and then your mum was trying to process the loss that she'd had via you because you kind of

reminded and looked a bit like your dad to her in that amazing painting where she painted you as

the central figure or him as the central figure but also now how your grief you know it's only

been four years or so since your mum sadly passed three and a half years yeah and how the grief

goes on but you kind of have solace in terms of your surrounded by the world of your mum that this

world she created I'm going to be honest with you it's complicated because it's obviously an

enormous privilege I think she is probably a genius I mean she's my mum so it's difficult to think

of her in those terms but I think she probably is she's certainly a very good artist but she might

be turning into as I say a legacy artist somebody that's going to live on for a very long time and be

part of the history of art and I love everything she does pretty much everything she does you know

everything there's something to admire in it every drawing every failed picture everything is

sort of interesting but at the same time as he is a burden because I had no choice I inherited it

I inherit the copyright so what I'm going to do with my sisters and my sisters by the way have

been totally great we have a very good relationship with three of us which isn't usually the case

with families right particularly families that inherit a big huge thing like this there's usually

fighting we did fight in the old days about you know the tricycle or whatever it was yeah when you

were kids but not now since mum's died we've been completely in unison about what to do what we're

going to do is a process but I'm trying to form a charity a foundation we'll call it the Polarego

foundation and we're going to gift everything to this foundation so we're going to give the

collection a very large collection the buildings the studio the dolls the archive and the catalog

resonate and also the copyright her copyright then I'll be able to crawl maybe out from under this

huge weight and burden and go to the beach and go back to making my films but at the moment it's

24-7 for me I've kind of got to a place where I'm at one with the reality that there's so much interest

in her that somebody has to be on the ball paying attention 24-7 what was it like being the child

of two artists because it's such a unique experience like not everyone gets to have that and obviously

you you're a creative yourself but it sounds like your grandparent was also a creative like there's

always been this creative thing in your family DNA I think what was it like because I also heard

your mum in the documentary you made about her talking about how when you were kids she would never

let any of you in the studio and she had this real like separate psychology as to her as the artist

and then her as a mother which she was happy and she felt like she loved you guys and she had all

that tenderness for you but in order to be the artist she had to be separate or you know

our arms lengthen away she never said for us to do anything she never told us what to do she never

did that to anybody she also had no judgment what I mean by that is she wasn't judgmental

at great judgment but not always actually in life she had terrible judgment a lot of the time

but she wasn't judgmental of other people and I remember often asking her oh isn't it terrible

that this person has done this and had an affair with this other person and she go well you know

I'm maybe he's better she wasn't judgmental in that sense but what was they like as

parents my dad was quite good he really worried about us more and he made sure we went to schools

my mother wouldn't have put him as in any school she was helpful in other ways you know if I had

a problem with a movie I remember I was making a huge epic with Dennis Hopper and Derek Jacob

this massive ancient Greek myth in Greece and Turkey we'd massive villages everywhere of ancient

Greek and I was having trouble and I was asked her she said oh feathers feathers what do you mean

feathers mum well just put them in there helmets they wore used to wear these feathers and I did

it I put I had this whole army and then it caught the wind and it flooded like a Kurosawa movie

wow it looks so good you know she was helpful in that sort of way she was helpful with the work

sometimes mostly we connected through her work and in the end when I made that film about her you

know the documentary that was very important for me personally because I had all my life

connected with her through her work and now she was connecting to me through my work

we met in the middle I was terrified making that film because I felt the responsibility of

getting it right yeah well I heard you didn't want to explain the work you you were very conscious

not to just be like this is the meaning behind the painting you didn't want to like lose the

magic or the mystery or the secrets actually yes you know because she didn't want that either

no so it was a big responsibility well in art a painting or a work of art works on such a different

level that it cannot be spoken about or explained with words sufficiently artists there are some

artists my dad was one could talk about art very very well the really great artists I think

aren't good at talking about their work my mother was terrible she would just screw up her face

and look at you and expect you to know and understand what's going on anyway in the picture because

the picture is the language and if you're having to translate it into a different language

it doesn't work the same way you see and also she had roots in surrealism she was fascinated in the

50s and 60s with surrealism and tapping into the unconscious and trying to understand and expose

what's going on inside you through the pictures you see so if there is a sense that you're

explaining the picture through understanding the secret see that's why it's a secret she would

want it to remain a secret so that you understand the picture through your own secrets that's

what she would say she would say people should come and look at my pictures and invent their own

stories because the pictures also maybe about them I don't know I don't know who they are but

that's how I look at pictures I see a Max Ernst or you know a Goya I don't know what's happening

in their lives at that moment I don't care because I'm responding to this picture through my life

so that's true but there's a but and that is that there is also a added pleasure in understanding

the layers of a picture just if you say oh this picture has a secret that in itself opens a door

and then I think there is a certain fascination in understanding a person's psyche and their life

it's a different thing your relationship with the picture won't be spoiled you can go and look at it

and imagine all your own stories but there is another story to tell which is her story and for me

that's fascinating because she's my mother you see I want to know what the hell was going on when

I wasn't around I was paying attention to her because I wanted to know what's happening in her

life you see so I have this fascination for uncovering the secrets for my own understanding of what

was going I'll tell you an example that's important when I made that film put it this way I discovered

while making the film the extent to which she suffered from depression throughout her life

I knew that she'd climb up and go quiet and be distant and disappear but I didn't understand why

I thought it was my fault most of the time that's what kids do they blame themselves mostly

but in making that film I understood that it wasn't about that it was because she was suffering

from an illness of depression that made me feel better about my relationship with her and my own

life it wasn't my fault you see so I think sometimes understanding the secret helps it may

only be a help to me but I think that people who are interested in going deeper into what was going

on in this artist's life might find it interesting to and also I think there's that thing with

artists where the outside world can see them as quite narcissistic or self-obsessed or self-absorbed

or all these things you know because they're so dedicated to themselves but actually artist care

so much and they have so much empathy because otherwise they wouldn't be able to make the work

there's that amazing work by your mum of the tortoise hands like the turtle hands and the story

of that are how this guy has two turtles for hands and in the end I think they give birth to

so many animals like an army of animals or something and he gets murdered by them or something but

it was this idea of anxieties and how your foibles or your obsessions or your overthinking can end up

taking over your body that you get destroyed but I love that work just summing up this idea

it's a story by Martin Madonna you know who made in Bruce he made the pillar man the play

he wrote it which also became a series of your mums she saw the pillar man and she thought

it was a work of genius she was so captivated and she responded and connected to it it's very

odd the play it is a work of genius I think and she just started making pictures of it but actually

when she started making pictures of it it's the most old story it changes and becomes about her

father now the pillar man is about a man who kills little children so that they don't have to

suffer life he's doing them a service by killing them that's the pillar man but there are all

sorts of other stories there's the little girl who wants to be Jesus and she wants to be Jesus

of course why wouldn't you not want to be Jesus your taught Jesus is what we've all got to be

Jesus so she wants to be Jesus and then her adopted parents help her by crucifying her and seeing

if she comes back from the dead because that's what happened to Jesus as she doesn't you know because

she just dies there are these horrible stories that Paul Arrego of course responded to and understood

them the macabre and violent and toxic nature of family power struggles yeah are very much part of

her language so she started making the this picture and the pillar man even though father was

certainly not a killer she loved her father very very very much it was an extraordinary man but she

it started to become about him you see so then the pillar man turns into her father it's a very odd

thing and then she makes a series of pictures the pillar man is a triptych which like a comic book

three panels tells the story of growing up in Portugal during the Second World War and what those

feelings were like and the mixture of conflicted feelings in there it's very passionate pictures

she considered it to be her most accomplished work not necessarily the best but that's certainly

the most accomplished it's now in the Hague in the Kunstmuseum in the Hague it's just my favorite

picture but she asked Martin Madonna oh do you have any other stories he said oh well he's the

most lovely man also very humble very modest like mum they shared that because they're two people

so lost well I don't know about I can't speak for him but mum it's sort of lost not knowing what

is this right is this wrong doubt full of doubt what you know which probably keeps her going like

you know what I mean like it keeps her going that that almost like that insecurity that position

means that you you never stop because you're always trying to investigate or do more but it

keeps you grounded in the sense that you don't get this idea of a grandeur no she never had

illusions of grandeur well it's so unhelpful to think you're a genius you know what I mean like

well but it's not people just it happens though doesn't it people start getting success and they

get told they're great and then it kills the art or it kills their musical or whatever it might be

yeah yeah yeah you convince yourself you drink the Kool-Aid yeah and people keep telling you how

brilliant you are she only heard the bad things Brian saw once gave her a bad review in the

evening standard do you remember him yeah yeah he once gave a lot of people bad reviews yeah that's

right but but he he sort of female issues work yucky yuck it was a bit like that I don't remember

her getting really any particularly bad reviews but she only sort of took to heart and took on

board the bad things and it didn't take much because you're already thinking so many bad things

and also her depression would also short-circuit any feelings of grandeur she'd be back down feeling

awful that's why you know when I asked her which would you prefer she say I'd prefer not to have

had depression even her success and all that stuff like she cared so much about all these pictures

she was making that it was such a vulnerable place to be because you're putting them out in

the world to have criticism or if she doesn't feel like it's successful enough as an image you know

the the idea of failure or something it's like this constant thing going on all the time through

the one terrified at her openings yeah you know here would be an opening the most exquisite pictures

and she'd be going oh my god do you think people make of it she'd feel very vulnerable so we

ask every guest this has been amazing by the way thank you so much being so generous we ask

every guest three questions at the end one is if you could do an imaginary art heist what work

would you take home and why maybe in relationship to your mum's works perhaps as we're so focused

and surrounded by her right now I would take the pillar man yes for me the pillar man is it's my

favorite picture that's such a good picture of my dad's I'd steal it from my sister his self-portrait

he did sitting at a table painting which is the most beautiful painting I've ever seen

and that's Victor willing you know yeah I tell you what when you first ask me that question

Victor willing yeah yeah look you can look it up online Victor willing painted a self-portrait him

sitting at a table wearing blue and when you were asking me that question I thought oh what would

I actually choose the funny thing is about from the world of art yeah yeah the weirdest thing is

and I cannot explain it but my favorite pictures tend to be abstract expressionism oh really I know

that I've lived all my life with figurative art but the work of Franz Klein in particular some of

Motherwell's paintings I find those to be just the best thing in the world and I wonder now just

thinking this for the first time because it's such an odd thing for me because it's the opposite of

Paul's work in a way it's not the opposite but it's just whether you it's because they're so filled

with feeling you know the thing about painting is that it can express feelings that no other medium

music writing nothing else film certainly can't express it in that way it gets it touches

something in your psyche that that only painting can touch it reflects feelings in you and help

you up and perhaps understand them better or not I don't know just living them for a bit and those

works really I find delicious but Paul does that too but in in her own unique way of course yeah

the pillar man I would take home my big though what is your favorite color wow I like a sort of

mustard really yeah I painted my living room once in this mustard color and my family rebelled and

said you've got to repay them we've painted it white again well why mustard what what is it makes

you don't know never had that answer before that's a great really yeah it's not really yellow it's

going closer to beige but it's not beige it's in between it's almost golden somehow yeah not you

mean I used to be really into wearing clothes though with that color actually yeah I've got a lot in

fact I nearly wore mustard colors really yeah I thought I'd just go boring green but yeah hard

question I know we often ask it just because it sometimes reveals I don't know a side to someone

that you might not get otherwise sometimes the simplest questions you know also it reflects the

spice my daughter my daughter my oldest daughter has a synesthesia so she sees people and things

as colors my mother had that about synesthesia as well Paul I had it about dates and months they

were all different colors do you know about this condition you must do yeah no yeah yeah we spoke

about it a few times yeah yeah and she had a synesthesia for for months of the year and oddly

summer wasn't yellow it was sort of like a different I can't remember what it was it was sort of

different complete a color you wouldn't expect what is the best advice you've ever received from my

mother the best advice I've received is that in order to make something that's good it has to

be true to you if you want to make art fit in my case it was film it has to be something that

lives inside you and you have to reflect it with all its weirdness or its truth anyway you see in

order to make something that resonates my dad used to say famously all the time not all the time

but we used to quote it all the time back to him that the thought is made in the mouth which means in

his case that you understand something by doing it that by making a picture you understand what

the picture is that you're making what it means to you by writing something about love you understand

in the writing of it what you feel about love and by talking about something you understand the

thought that you're trying to express so he would say the thought is made in the mouth and that is

a sort of offshoot of my mother's lesson my mother didn't teach me that lesson she never

taught me anything she never told me to do anything it's just through example amazing well thank you

so much I've loved every minute of this and even just before we started recording we spent like

40 minutes walking around and just looking at everything and it was just I'm blown away so thank

you it's been one of the most special conversations I've had actually and for everyone listening you

can go see this amazing show I'm at Victoria Mirro and it's opening in April and runs until the

end of May and you can go to at Victoria Mirro on Instagram it's called Storyline and it opens on

the 17th of April until the 23rd of May 16 Warth Road which is very easy to walk to from either

Angel or Old Street and I really recommend going because there's so many works in the show that

no one's ever seen before or at least all together how many works is it in the show over 130 drawings

yeah it's going to be incredible and I've had the privilege to actually see some and right now I'm

just looking out at the studio and actually right next to us is the pillow man the original

handmade sculpture that Paula would look at almost like a life model to create that work so it

feels very apt so thank you so much Nick and um for everyone listening we'll be back very soon

bye

you've been listening to TalkArt with Robert Diamond follow us on Instagram at TalkArt where you

can view images of all artworks discussed in today's episode with music by Jack Northover

please subscribe rate and leave us a comment wherever you get your podcasts and tell your friends

about us too thanks for listening

spring weekends are my favorite the artistful blooms the grill is fired up and the family

gathers around the patio table before everyone arrives I stop by my local total wine and more to

pick up a few bottles of wine usually a cabernet I already love and sometimes a new fine to share

find what you love and love what you find only at total wine and more visit total wine.com to

learn more spirits not sold in Virginia and North Carolina drink responsibly be 21