Paula Rego, an appreciation: ‘She painted to find out what she felt’

I first met Paula Rego 20 years in the past, interviewed her once more as she turned 80 and had a closing dialog, by e-mail, in 2021, simply earlier than the Tate’s magnificent retrospective of her work; it was fairly presumably the final interview she gave. Our first assembly – she would have been in her 60s – was in her studio in Kentish City. She got here throughout as a thriving Londoner and, on the identical time, as unswervingly Portuguese.

Come to Me, from Paula Rego’s Jane Eyre collection. Copyright Paula Rego, Courtesy Victoria Miro

Her studio was stuffed with outlandish creatures – a lifesize horse, a stuffed pelican, a battered toy monkey. And there have been garments on racks: a Victorian frock-coat, a tomato-coloured waistcoat, a taffeta gown. It was like being backstage – she was director, designer, wardrobe mistress multi functional. I used to be thrilled by her creativeness and by all the pieces she needed to say. She was about to exhibit her formidable work based mostly on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. I keep in mind telling her how I marvelled on the means she had launched Jane from the straitjacket of being an English governess and translated her right into a Mediterranean determine in whom need is grimly undisguised. Her Jane, I mirrored out loud, was no mouse. At this, Rego, who had till this level been speaking in a beneficiant, modest, cooperatively responsive means, exploded: “I don’t imagine within the existence of little mice! Each mouse has intestines and enamel and they're terrifying, these little mice. Jane Eyre is definitely a little bit of a rat, though noble and really proud.”

All through her profession, Rego’s championing of ladies was devoted, fierce and complex: she was no polemicist, but her work – particularly, the 1998 sequence of 10 work on abortion – did greater than any verbal demonstration may to assist change Portuguese anti-abortion legislation. The championing was sophisticated as a result of she didn't flip her girls into heroines, however explored their ache, sorrow, passion – and faultiness. She continued to specific her personal emotions about being a girl too: a number of of her finest work grew out of her marriage to the artist Victor Keen, who died tragically younger of MS.

‘What's she considering?’: The Policeman’s Daughter, 1987 by Paula Rego. Photograph: Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro

Rego was actually no mouse herself, though one may say – she wouldn't have minded – that there was a playful monkey in her (delinquent monkeys characteristic in fantastic work from the 80s). I can nonetheless see the mischief in her smile, the quarrelling enamel, the flash in her eyes – the sense of the inextinguishable youngster within the older lady. At 80, she instructed me: “I’m not courageous in actual life however I’m not afraid of doing something in my work.”

I really like her work as a result of it does what the most effective work do: it raises questions that can't be definitively answered. Wanting by the Tate’s catalogue of last yr’s retrospective, I'm struck once more by how seldom her topics look again at you. There's a sense of trespass as you intrude on their reverie. This, partially, is what makes her work powerfully enigmatic and subversive. What's The Policeman’s Daughter (1987) considering as she polishes her father’s boot? What does the girl dancing with out a accomplice within the moonlight in her masterpiece, The Dance (1988), really feel in her unsuitable strolling sneakers? And what, in The Household (1988), are we to make of the girl dressing a helpless man – roughest of nurses – her arm throughout his mouth as if stifling him, her personal mouth fastened in an expression of unreliable pleasantness? The horizon she stares at we can not see. Rego’s mannequin and good friend Lila Nunes, as soon as the household au pair, seems repeatedly in these work – all the time and by no means the identical.

A exceptional factor to emerge from the 2021 interview was that, even within the superior fragility of previous age, Rego continued to go to her Kentish City studio day by day to work. I'm tempted to put in writing: she was an inspiration. But I do know she would have dismissed this, would have mentioned work was crucial for survival and that portray was who she was. She instructed me, in our final dialog, that she painted to seek out out what she felt: there was no such factor as identified portions or foregone conclusions. The disappointment on listening to of her dying might be felt by everybody who met her, irrespective of how briefly, and by numberless admirers all through the world, however her incomparable work will proceed to maintain us guessing: they'll by no means be solved, by no means be up to now tense.

‘Her masterpiece’: Paula Rego’s The Dance, 1988. Photograph: Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro