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Although trained as a painter, these days Rego draws rather than paints. Her current popularity rests principally on a remarkable body of graphic work which includes pastels, ink drawings and a huge range of etchings and lithographs. Most recently she has eschewed the succulent textures and sensual layering of pastel and has reduced her art to the bare bones of linearity, using mainly graphite and conté pencil. Her work is essentially narrative in impulse: she is a great storyteller who is unafraid to engage with the darker aspects of the human psyche.
I visited her in her north London studio, and asked her about the Rego museum, which is planned to open this September. ‘I didn’t know whether to accept or not. It’s a big honour to have something like that. It’s in Cascais, which is a beautiful place very near where I was brought up, and it has a marvellous architect called Souto de Moura.’ Appropriately, the building will be called House of Stories and Rego is donating to it a complete set of her prints (now numbering well over 300 items), together with her collection of paintings and drawings by Victor Willing. ‘We can’t really show together — it’s very different work — therefore I will have the opening exhibition and then it will be him. My involvement [with the museum] is very little. The whole point is to collaborate with other countries, especially England, to do shows of narrative art. Hogarth and Daumier, for example. The chance to show things that most people don’t see.’ Apparently, it’s being funded by the local casino, a sponsorship solution unlikely to occur in England.
When I visited her, Rego was in the process of completing and proofing a suite of five new etchings on the taboo subject of female circumcision. These powerful prints confront the cruelty of ritual mutilation with images of the vagina dentata, stitched-up orifices and grimly watching mothers. Rego comments: ‘I can’t remember exactly what made me decide to do them. I read several things, and there’s a doctor here who treats the women who come over to give birth and have a terrible time because they’re ripped open, and she mends them. People say you mustn’t criticise the customs of another culture. Maybe not, but if they cause such pain I don’t see why you can’t say something. Later on I did see a marvellous documentary on BBC4 which showed all those things happening in a country where it is forbidden by law. Yet it happens all over the world. Out of tradition, the mothers insist that their daughters have it done. Apparently it goes back to the pharaohs.’
Rego was distressed by the injustice and cruelty of the practice and ‘the slight kinkiness of the mother wanting this done when she’s had it done herself. There’s a lot of stuff that’s not ever talked about. It’s always the fathers — the mothers are never talked about.’ What does she hope to achieve — that the practice will stop? Don’t underestimate the power of the pencil. Ten years ago Rego’s abortion series managed to get the law changed in Portugal. Before her hard-hitting prints and paintings on the subject were shown there, abortion was illegal. ‘I feel very pleased that they legalised abortion. Sooner or later they would have done it, but I’m very glad that I did something, that I painted something so much after my own heart. It meant so much to me.’
She maintains that she has always been a political artist, since the days of her early collages attacking the Portuguese dictator Salazar. And the main subject of her work has long been the relationships between people, which is really the politics of power. Rego suffers from depression and insists that it is only art that keeps her sane. She certainly keeps busy. The main room of the studio is dominated by an altarpiece she is making for the Foundling Hospital, to be part of an exhibition of three artists, Rego, Tracey Emin and Matt Collinshaw, scheduled for 2010. ‘I went to see the place and I saw the little trinkets that the women left when they left their babies — heartbreaking stories.’ What Rego has made is a kind of portable altar that folds up like a cupboard, containing eight large drawings with a group of figures or props in front. Her habit of drawing from life has recently been extended by creating increasingly complex tableaux. Rego makes figures for these tableaux which are a cross between rag dolls and plaster models. Is she becoming a sculptor? ‘No,’ she says, ‘a prop-maker.’ Last year she exhibited her props for the first time in a show at the Marlborough gallery in New York. Before that she felt that the props she’d made to staff her pictures could only work with people, but now she’d made objects capable of standing alone.
She says: ‘You find out what it is you want to do through the process of doing it. You have an idea beforehand and then on the way it changes, sometimes quite a lot. Then, when you’ve come to the end of the paper, you realise, “Ah, that’s what it was all along.”’ She rejects the idea that she may be a conduit for some external force, like a spirit medium, and emphasises the role of the individual. ‘It’s you who do it. And when you discover what things look like from drawing them, it’s most exciting. You forget everything else because your attention is totally focused on what you’re doing. I’ve always been better at drawing than painting. I just try to get better and better. That is my wish: to be able to draw really well.’
Paula Rego’s new etchings will be launched by Marlborough Fine Art at The London Original Print Fair at the Royal Academy, 22–26 April. A new film on her work by Jake Auerbach called PAULA REGO: telling tales will be released on DVD this spring.
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