You Need To Know About Paula Rego
One of the people thrown into relief by the death of art critic Robert Hughes is Paula Rego. Hughes considered her the greatest painter alive who happened to be a woman. I’ve been familiarizing myself with Rego’s work from this website, which says: ‘Paula Rego, a painter and printmaker, is one of the most celebrated artists working in Britain. (Pictured is her painting “Swallows the Poisoned Apple.”) She was born in Lisbon in 1934. Her childhood in Portugal was a mixture of upper middle class privilege (her father an engineer and anglophile) and the compafny of servants. The Portugal she grew up in was under the dictatorship of Salazar, a country held in tension and somewhat isolated from the rest of Europe. She attended an English school in Portugal before being sent to a finishing school in Kent. From there she went on to study at the Slade under William Coldstream in the company of students who were to become leading figures in the British art scene; Craigie Aitchison, Michael Andrews, Euan Uglow and her future husband Victor Willing.’
Later she married the painter Victor Willing and settled in London permanently.
Paula Rego paints a world of dark fairy tale where childhood stories are thin guises for psycho-sexual intrigue and taboo, her work always has a sense of magical realism. Rego’s style is often compared to cartoon illustration.
