Paula Rego's gothic, grotesque paintings (original) (raw)

I want to tell a story about the artist Paula Rego - well, a number of stories really. Stories she has told and retold me over meetings in the past 10 years. They are not particularly comfortable stories but Paula won't mind that - the stories she has been telling in her work for the past 50 odd years have never been what might be called polite.

The first meeting started off very cosy. I do remember at one point her mother, quite an old lady then, and charming, coming into the room and Rego's observation, quick as a flash, when she left. "Isn't she small? I think it must have affected her character all her life, being tiny." I remember, too, being entranced by her stories, mostly about growing up in Portugal, the foreignness, the exoticism of them, but also this curious way she has of drawing you into a childlike interior world, as if she is still there, or anyway has not erased in her mind the drama of being a child.

Back in 1992 she told me about her childhood. She grew up a solitary but privileged only child in a large house in Lisbon presided over by a grandmother, a manic-depressive great aunt, an array of maids and later a governess, Donna Violetta, whom she loathed and who, it seems, bullied her. "The good days were the days the teacher didn't come."

When she was one and a half, her mother and her father, an electrical engineer, left her in Portugal, in the hands of this female household, in order for the father to come to England to work for Marconi, then based in Chelmsford, Essex. Her mother would send her postcards extolling the glamour of Frinton-on-Sea, though years later, when Rego herself visited Frinton, she found it "horrible". "They had made it sound so smart." Eighteen months later, when she was three, her parents returned, "both plump, my father fat from beer", and she didn't recognise them. "I didn't know what a mother was."

All this was told without a hint of self-pity, on the contrary with a kind of wicked relish interspersed with giggles. "I was perfectly happy." And never happier, she says, than when chopping up the miserable aunt's curtains with a pair of outsize scissors, all the while observed by the old lady in her armchair, where she sat "too depressed to move". Cruel stories, but funny, and all told in this strange lilting rhythm she has, a legacy obviously of her Portuguese background. But somehow her unfailing ability to inflect always the wrong word - much as the rhythms in her pictures disturb, set askew, our conventional view of domestic life - makes you wonder if there isn't some mischief here.

So I was surprised when she began to cry. She was talking about her late husband, the artist Victor Willing, who had died of multiple sclerosis six years before, aged 60, after 20 years of deterioration from the illness. She was recalling how they met, in 1953, she 18, Vic 25, both of them students at the Slade. Vic was already married. Rego became pregnant within months of their meeting. When she told him, he "abandoned" her. "Went back to his wife in Guildford." Rego wrote to her father in Portugal who drove from Lisbon to London in 36 hours to collect her. Her mother was "upset and ashamed". Her father was not. "It never occurred to me that he would be upset." It was a year later that Willing joined her and their baby daughter in Portugal. It was the barest outline of a story but she was clearly distraught.

I suppose I knew that seeing her 10 years on, the story would be repeated, that we would talk about Willing. He was her husband of 30 years, the father of their three children, her mentor, "an intellectual". She looks up to him as an artist. "He was much better than me, always was." I knew also, of course, that in the intervening years certain things had changed. Her mother had died, one year ago: "She had a good innings, as they say." She has a new granddaughter to add to her existing four granddaughters. And certain things had not changed. She remains, she says, scared of being alone and of the dark. "Still a scaredy-cat, still afraid that the devil is coming to get me." Like the child in a haunted house? "Just like that child."

"Yes, Vic abandoned me," she told me this time. "He did, he did." He seduced her. "When he said, 'Take your knickers off,' I did it. I always did what he told me. I loved him like mad." When he rang her to say he was going back to his wife - "It's over, I'm not seeing you, I have to give it another try" - she didn't argue. She sat down and wrote the letter to her father. In the car travelling back to Lisbon, he played opera, in Paris he bought her clothes. "It was quite cheerful." Her father paid for her to come to England to have the baby. Vic saw them every week. Later, when she was back in Portugal, he wrote to her father asking to visit. "He came. We lived there for five years, then we came to London. So it worked out all right."

It is not the same story. Or not quite the same story, something has changed. The later story is amplified, is more complex and you would think all the more painful for that. The fact of abandonment remains, she doesn't seek to deny it, or to resolve it. And certainly she doesn't prettify it - that terrible phrase about the knickers, the sense of victimisation, the two powerful men, one the aggressor, one the saviour. What has changed is the feeling. And there are no tears.

You could say this is defensive, that, 10 years on, the reality has become less real, less threatening - but the detail belies this, suggests on the contrary a reality vividly called to consciousness. You can ask Rego about this, as you can ask her about anything - I don't think I have ever met anyone less inclined to perceive a trap in a question, or as disinclined to take offence. It's just that her answers will frustrate you if what you are looking for is a solution to the problem raised. It is as though the story has become one of her pictures - which also raise conflicts they refuse to resolve.

In her pictures, Rego never takes a character's side. Dichotomies, good and bad, don't engage her. She likes things messy. It never occurred to her, she says, to judge Vic. "I didn't think there was anything wrong with his behaviour. I think. Well, I don't think, to tell you the truth."

This must be right. In Rego's work, as in the stories she tells about her life, there is no search for a rational explanation. What interests her is precisely whatever is distanced from our rational attention. Her gaze, and the gaze of the characters in her pictures, is entirely subjective. In Rego's work, it is the world of the imagination that becomes the greater reality, as if she is handing us a magic mirror in which to see things that perhaps we would normally choose not to see.

And always her subject is the apparently familiar - the bourgeois, the domestic, family relations - characters we should recognise, mothers and daughters, little girls with their dogs. But somehow now metamorphosed into the grotesque, into what could be called the everyday fantastic. It is probably fair to say that most of her pictures dramatise desire and guilt, those two psychological paradigms, but desire for what and guilt about what? Her figures hold on to their secrets, secrets being the matrix, the womb, in which anxiety is born.

One thing about Rego: she never explains. She dislikes theory, maintains she doesn't understand it. Some years ago, an eminent feminist art critic asked her about the presence of a figure in one of her pictures. "It's there because it looks right," Rego replied. "And she told me off. She told me I should take responsibility for what I do. Well, I said, my signature is on it. To me if they look right, they are right." And when I asked her if she could tell me why there aren't more men in her pictures, she looked at first confused and then turned to an old catalogue, pointing to her 1986 picture Untitled, of a girl holding a dog on her knee. "There are men in my pictures," she said. "That's a man, except it's a dog."

Sometimes she will take a well-known painting or series of paintings, as with her recent triptych, Betrothal; Lessons; Shipwreck; After Marriage à la Mode by Hogarth, 1999, and retells the story - an arranged marriage that has calamitous results - in a contemporary form. Now it is the women who are negotiating the devilish contract. Hidden in her picture are other stories, still untold - the daughter so suggestively returning her father's gaze; what appears to be a violent sexual scene in the background, positioned where Hogarth places the house that his alderman is building; they look to a future event, a reality not yet unfurled, but already contained within the drama of the picture.

And always there are mysteries, suggestions of what may have happened, what may be to come. In The Maids, 1987, inspired by Jean Genet's play, itself drawn from the real-life case of the Papin sisters, who one day, apparently unaccountably, murdered the daughter and mistress of the house, it is not clear if the background maid is cuddling the girl or in the process of killing her. We know, don't we, that she will kill her? And in her great picture, The Family, 1988, is the apparently helpless man being tormented by the maid and his wife, or are they merely helping him undress? Has his home become his prison? And why is the maid looking out at us with such a grin? Why, if the man is being hurt, is the little girl, observing, standing with her hands clasped as if in prayer? And, of course, since we, the viewer, cannot escape our own subjective view - perhaps the maid is looking out at us because she can read what is on our minds.

Painting, Rego says, making a picture, is not unlike bringing up children. "You prepare them for the best possible world, always, you have to, but you know that the terrible may happen." She doesn't say - the obvious - that we are all of us, as parents, as individuals, powerless to prevent this. But even the terrible, or maybe especially the terrible, as she reminds me, has a power of transformation. "It may be turned to the positive, you see. Because there is no end to a story, it unfolds all the time." Tears can become a kind of equanimity, just as surely as the man in the picture can become a dog on your knee, passive, maybe faithful, maybe not, or a mother a cabbage weeping. And the mother again, in Convulsion, 2000, becomes a repulsive, supine figure. "Look," says Rego. "That's a mother who won't let go."

In her excellent book about Paula Rego, recently published by the Tate, Fiona Bradley, a curator at the Hayward Gallery and an expert on Rego's work, makes this general observation. "She is interested in the everyday but supremely uninterested in conforming to what might be expected of her or of her characters." It is this last point that is particularly interesting. Maybe Rego's characters are to her a bit like children - she gives them autonomy, she leaves them alone to act out their own dramas, much as she was left alone as a child. When I ask her for some advice on motherhood, she says, "Leave them alone, let them get on with it, what else can you do?"

It was also Bradley who warned me, "Don't be tempted into reading her pictures purely as autobiography. I know sometimes she will map them out this way." In The Dance, Bradley points out, a picture composed in 1986, at the same time that Vic was dying, there is a woman dancing alone in the foreground. The other women are all partnered, two of them by men. Three other women dance together, a grandmother, her daughter and the granddaughter - pointing to pasts and futures. But it was Vic's idea to have men in the picture at all, Rego has said as much herself. "Vic thought it would be boring without men, so he said put some in." And, compositionally, Bradley says, "There just wasn't room for a man. She is always steered first by what the painting needs pictorially and then by the subject." But can you separate the two?

Rego says now that Portugal is no longer her home, that England is her home - she has lived here on and off for 50 years - some separation is possible. But Portugal is ever present in the pictures, compositionally - in the light, in the shadows cast, in the horizons that we glimpse across her characters' shoulders - but more particularly in the atmosphere, the sense of menace, of something not quite said. She was born in 1935, three years into the dictatorship of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar and into a culture, she says, suffused with secrets. It was here that she learned a lifetime habit - "You never asked questions, never answered back."

It was here, too, that she learned the power of secrets, how we need them and how they distort us. "People led secret lives but underneath there was always a sense of something vile going on. I think it's called hypocrisy but let's not call it that. I think they needed to, to survive." Her father was ardently anti-fascist and, though wealthy and a factory owner, he always dreamed of creating a business in which the workers would share in the profits. And this spirit of resistance was important to her, "that he was anti-fascist, very".

Later, when she was married, it was her father who supported them financially, saw the children through school. "He was the most generous man in the world." Generous but also powerless to resist the political climate in Portugal; and the irony, says Rego, is that it was the revolution of 1974, eight years after her father's death, that finally destroyed his dream of a collective. "A good revolution, fantastic, at last. But not good for business." The factory was lost. Men, a traditional seat of power - especially in Portugal where 80% of women did not then have the vote - are either absent or powerless, often drunk, in her pictures.

But as a child there was always money - for a dressmaker, for the maids, those slightly enigmatic observers in her pictures, occupying a position halfway between adult and child. "My mother said the most important thing is that a woman should be well-dressed." Together they would go through French Vogue looking at fashion to copy. "You couldn't get anything into Portugal at that time, the whole peninsula was cut off because of Franco's Spain." So, a sense of claustrophobia combined with a sense of female inventiveness. Her mother had a very good eye, Rego says. "But she hated to pay a compliment. And that meant that later, if she said something was good, I could believe her." She never lied to her.

Daughters and their relationship with their mothers is a recurring theme in Rego's work and generally the mothers get a pretty bad press - they are the ones hanging on, or, with their voracious appetites, devouring their daughters. Certainly Rego adored her father and found her mother a suffocating influence. "I didn't like her, I was frightened of her. I think I liked her for a bit when I was 14. But I kept things from her always, all my personal life, until it was inevitable, until the baby was showing." Yet her mother lived with her to the end of her life. "I never had the courage to ask her to leave. I felt I was still the little girl, although old already. I don't think you ever get over that feeling."

Various things about her. She believes in God. "I think it is because I am Portuguese and because I love stories and Christianity is a very good story." Artists, she says, have always looked to religious iconography, even a surrealist like Max Ernst or an impressionist like Manet: "Because it's a story loaded with meaning, it is beautiful but in a rather terrifying way. It is in your bowels."

And religion, like art, is about transformation. "If you go on a picnic and the water is turning into wine before your very eyes - because nothing is just a picnic, don't you see? - well, then you have an explanation for the magic that exists already." She loves saints: "Saints perform miracles." But hates Mother Teresa. "Because she never encouraged women to use contraception. She'd say, We have saved these little souls for God. Well, for a miserable life."

She is not apolitical. In 1998, after the Portuguese Socialist government abandoned the bill to legalise abortion in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, following a 10% voter turnout, Rego made a series of drawings, pastels and prints featuring women undergoing backstreet abortions, specifically to be exhibited in Portugal. When she was pregnant with her first child, in 1954, and her father was driving her back to Portugal, he said to her, "You can get rid of it, you know." "I don't want to," she said. Previously she had become pregnant by Vic and had had an abortion.

People often talk of revenge in Rego's pictures and this is partly due to the artist herself who refers to it often. "I come in here to my studio and kill them off, I did and I do. Painting is more truthful than life, that's for sure. It all comes out." It comes out most obviously in The Red Monkey series - the wife cutting off a red monkey's tail and the monkey's revenge: he gives her a poison dove. Rego once described these pictures as "incomplete separations" and perhaps this is her dominant theme: no separation possible from the past, from the parent. Between inner and outer world. It can't be coincidence that her latest picture is inspired by Kafka's The Metamorphosis - Gregor Samsa waking from a strange dream into an even stranger reality. Kafka himself was the artist above all for whom life and art were inseparable. Kafka who on his deathbed could write a sentence like this: "Put your hand on my forehead a moment to give me courage."

And so, inevitably, to Victor Willing. When he was dying in 1987, Rego says, at the age of only 60, he showed courage. "He was amazing. When he was on his uppers, when he had nothing left - we weren't getting on very well by then - he took a derelict studio in Stepney, moved in there and started to paint again. When he couldn't even stand up, was almost totally paralysed, he painted. Visions. It takes guts to do that." One day she took him The Maids to ask him what he thought. Well, he said, "You have some rather well-painted figures in the front but the back is a mess. Paint it out." And she did, because she always did what he told her. "Saved the picture. He helped me, until he died." He died, peacefully at home at four one morning. "It was very simple. We were all there, even my bloody mother."

Stories don't end, Rego says. "Vic's story hasn't ended, it goes on and on. He is always there in my pictures, his voice in my head." The stories go on, transforming themselves or rather transformed by us, in life and art.

· Paula Rego's painting inspired by Kafka is on show in the Metamorphing exhibition at the Science Museum until January 26. The triptych after Hogarth is part of the permanent exhibit at Tate Britain, and The Dance and Bride are on show at the New Art Gallery in Walsall.