Rego Retold: Tribute and Adventure ~ CookingFood.Org

Introduced to the art of Dame Paula Rego by her model and companion, Anthony Rudolf, I immediately felt myself drawn into the uneasy dramas of her work, responding to the artist’s open invitation to engage and interpret the stories that so often underpin her pictures. In part, the relationship between my poetry and Paula’s art is that which is evident in a great deal of ekphrastic literary reaction to traditional forms of visual art. The poems and pictures complement each other, with the latter existing as immediate events, generating an instantaneous impact, all be it one that can, and does, evolve over time, and the poems enjoying the luxury of greater temporal freedom, moving between the past, the present, and the future, perhaps flowing around and between the present tense tableaux, and exploring them from new angles.

In Paula Rego’s case, however, these are not the frozen heroic and classical tableaux of comfortable museums, but the ghosts and embodiments of domestic nightmares, combinations of the familiar and the uncanny, making the poetic exploration all the more challenging and enticing. The poems are therefore offered the opportunity to cross comfortable boundaries and confront the world behind closed eyes and front windows, and, at times, to seek out glimpses of the artist’s own preoccupations. It is this territory that is particularly appealing when writing about Rego’s work.

Snare, 1987

Whether the pictures take a step back from difficult circumstances and contexts, replacing human characters with impostors from the animal world, as in the Dog Woman pictures, for example, or whether they immerse themselves in literary parables and parallels, their beauty is that they capture genuine human potential and weaknesses, without any attempt to air-brush them. Thus, Paula Rego’s Jane Eyre is sturdy, strong, not conventionally pretty, contradicting so many feature film portrayals, and her struggles are all the more believable as a result. This demands honesty in return from any ekphrastic poem. If the stories are to be written about, then the poems, with which they interact, must be equally direct and sincere. This is another aspect of writing about Paula’s work that makes the whole exercise so exhilarating.

Come to Me, 2001-2002

Of course, there is room for invention, as Paula’s stories undergo the process of pictorialisation, and then re-telling as poems, but this is surely the fate of any public art, and particularly that of Paula Rego, given the playful and authentic nature of her invitation to read into, or out from, the pictures on an individual and subjective basis. Few artists would be this generous, and I hope that the poems of my Rego Retold answer in kind, because this was certainly the spirit in which they were written, and in which they are intended to be read. They are both tribute and response, dramas that are associative and independent, but ones to which the artist’s achievement is always essential.

Owen Lowery.

Paula Rego, born in Portugal, studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1952 till 1956. In 1990, she was the first National Gallery Associate Artist. She was commissioned by the Royal Mail to produce a set of Jane Eyre stamps in 2005. Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, a museum devoted to her great passion, storytelling, was opened in Cascais, Portugal in 2009. She was created a Dame of the British Empire in 2010 and has several honorary degrees, including one from Oxford University. Paula Rego has had many solo shows of her paintings and prints (lithographs and etchings) in London and Lisbon and around the world, and has appeared in countless group shows. A major retrospective of her work was held at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid in 2007 and moved to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, in 2008. During the last twenty years Rego has mainly worked in pastel. Her books include the Folio Society Nursery Rhymes and Peter Pan and most recently Stone Soup. She lives and works in London, where she is represented by Marlborough Fine Art.

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