Paula Rego
Paula Rego
Dame Paula Rego, DBE, is a Portuguese-born visual artist who is particularly known for her paintings and prints based on storybooks. Rego’s style has evolved from abstract towards representational, and she has favoured pastels over oils for much of her career. Her work often reflects feminism, coloured by folk-themes from her native Portugal...
cutting paper may
In collage you're doing it in stages so you're not actually doing it right there. You first of all draw it on the paper, then you cut it up, then you paste it down, then you change it, then you shove it about, then you may paint bits of it over, so actually you're not making the picture there and then, you're making it through a process, so it's not so spontaneous.
david face goes healthy lamb looks quite sheep touching worried
It's to look after him. The little face of the lamb looks quite old; it's quite a worried and touching face. The things I couldn't get into David's face I put into the sheep's face. It's complementary; it goes well with him and looks after him. David has the good-looking face of a healthy young man. The sheep complemented it.
looked
It just didn't look like him; it looked like some movie star.
anyone known
He was brilliantly still, and I've never known anyone so punctual.
drawing vitality painting
Sketches always have more vitality than paintings because you're finding things out through doing them.
dog powerful littles
To be a dog woman is not necessarily to be downtrodden; that has very little to do with it. In these pictures every woman's a dog woman, not downtrodden, but powerful. To be bestial is good. It's physical. Eating, snarling, all activities to do with sensation are positive. To picture a woman as a dog is utterly believable.
real fall dust
Another thing that escapes me is HOW to give substance to the forms. One day they look solid and 'real' and they seem to hinge upon each other and splinter and creak, fall with a thud to the bottom of the canvas and drag across the surface, and the next day they are like dust, all lightweight and just stuck there.
art looks modern
That is why my pictures don't look like modern art. It's some sort of timidity on my part I'm sure.
poetry unleashing poetry-is
Poetry is good for unleashing images.
facts thanks selling
I'm not fashionable at all, and the fact that I manage to sell pictures without being fashionable is thanks to my gallery.
space worry gaps
The gaps between the forms worry me. I can never get these spaces right...
way upstairs creeps
I thought the only way you can get into things is... through the basement... exactly where my studio was ... I could creep upstairs and snatch at things, and bring them down with me... where I could munch away at them.
world way stories
We interpret the world through stories... everybody makes in their own way sense of things, but if you have stories it helps.
song art children
I get inspiration from things that have nothing to do with painting: caricature, items from newspapers, sights in the street, proverbs, nursery-rhymes, children's games and songs, nightmares, desires, terrors. ... That question [why do you paint?] has been put to me before and my answer was, 'To give terror a face.' But it's more than that. I paint because I can't help it.