Paula Rego as a Famous Painter - Essay Example

Order #:194774 Born in Lisbon, Paula Rego was educated in the English style, being the of the Slade Art School. She learnt how to paint under the guiding of Coldstream. Her first paintings are influenced by Dubuffet's picture and the subjects illustrate themes of the respective time. Later works present experiences from her own childhood. Very successful artist, she became in 1990 the first associate of the London National Gallery. Paula Rego established her way of working in the making of the Girl and Dog series. She initially draws onto the wax with gouache, before drawing through the wax with an etching needle. At this stage, the drawing is linear and stark. The quality of the line is determined by the length of time it stays in the acid, the longer in the acid, the darker the line becomes. This whole process is described by professor Paul Coldwell. Drawing is central to the painter's work, being the way in which her works are born. The Portuguese painter found her source of inspiration in fairy tales like Fantasia, Snow White and Pinocchio. And she made her pictures resemble the children's drawings. But as compared to the representation of beautiful figures, illustrating the good characters of the fairy tale, Paula Rego's characters are far from being described by the adjective "beautiful" in the sense we understand the meaning of the word "beauty". Taking as example the painting entitled "Swallows the poisoned apple" we notice how different the Snow White we are shown here is from the image of the young and delicate charater of Grimm's fairy tale. It's definitely not a beautiful young girl what we see. On the contrary, the female character in the painting looks old and ugly. She doesn't appear as it would in a common drawing, lying artistically on the floor, but she is half on the floor, half on the sofa, in a position that conveys pain realistically. Although dressed like a princess, the background against which she is painted is a modern decorated room and not the fairy tale dwarves' house. There is a combination of myth and reality in this painting that makes us think of the combination myth-reality we find in our own lives. We thus, could see these paintings as symbolical representation of our own lives. Represented in another painting, with a stag's head on her lap, Snow White doesn't look more beautiful than in the other painting described. The painting is called suggestively "Snow white playing with her father's trophies." Seated in an armchair, she has an indelicate and unaesthetic position, with her legs spread. Just like in the previously analyzed painting, Snow White looks older than she is supposed to be and her appearance is not as delicate as we are used to imagine it. There is no trace of happiness or at least serenity to be noticed on the face of the two Snow White figures. If in the previous painting, pain would appear as understandable, the character being shown in a critical situation, in the second the grief is not so explicable. Although traditional by subject, the fairy tales inspired drawings cannot be considered traditional. The way of treating them is startling and this makes their contemplation the source of mixed and confusing feelings. This kind of illustrating fairy tale images can be viewed as a sort of debunk. Myth is given certain realistic features and at the same time, reality is transformed. Nursery Rhymes (from 1989) show a girl - although we could not really use the word girl for her as she looks aged and three strangely big and frightening mice. The painting looks at the same time funny and horrible. The exaggerated size of the mice as well as the way they look is scaring. Yet, there is something amusing in their behaviour, as they look like whimsical children. We notice a synthesis of opposites that the painter achieves in her paintings, be that a synthesis between comic and scaring, young and old, myth-reality or beautiful and ugly. As frightening or at least confusing and ugly as the fairy tales characters are, are the reality characters depicted in Paula Rego's work. The same sadness or resignation is to be seen on their faces. The bride figure in the 1994 painting with the same name doesn't fit the traditional figure of bride. Sad and lost, lying on the floor, she looks lost in another world. Although image of a bride dressed in white, the painting doesn't look luminous. All the background colours have a dark nuance and even the white looks somehow darkened. Margaret Walters, who wrote a magazine article about the Portuguese painter, describes her drawings as a "darkly comic world."1 "They are like illustrations to a story that we heard perhaps a long time ago, stills from a movie we might once have seen."2 And here we get to the commonly shared idea among Rego's critics - that referring to the narrative aspect of her works. They seem stories visually told, in such a vivid and direct manner that they may to a certain extent be associated with the primitive way of depicting life. The narrative aspect is, yet, marked in Rego's works by ambiguity and elusiveness and the picture shows a multiple possible ends and interpretations story. So we, the viewers are shown characters placed against a background, and it's our responsibility to make up the story starting from the elements we have. The work of art becomes, thus, a way of communicating a multitude of meanings that in fact exist in our world or in us but we are unable of perceiving otherwise. "The Family", work dating from 1988, may have different interpretations if we look at it as a visually told story. We notice a man who seems to have lost conscience or to be dead, a woman and two girls. If we want to describe the image, we cannot really do it. And that because we don't know exactly what happens. Are the woman and the girl trying to help the man or they want to hurt him What is the little girl standing near the window doing and who is she All these are questions that remain unanswered. Or, on the contrary, they have too many answers: the woman and the other girl are trying to help the man that has just fainted and the other girl, in the background is surprised by the situation; the woman and the girl hurt the man. In both cases after we answered the first questions that come to our mind, other questions arise: "why has he fainted", or "why did they harm him" Not really a follower of the time fashion in point of artistic values, techniques and source of inspiration, Paula Rego offers through her paintings images that are illustrative of our lives. They show truths about us and our world. They are the image of a confusing and troubled world, marked by a lot of dramas and by a distortion of meaning. Although taking their source from reality, the drawings are not mere copies of it. They are in fact, we may say, a suggestive representation of the truth that lies beyond the superficially treated important actions and aspects of human life. Close family relations are explored in the "Policeman's Daughter", or in "The Family." None of them renders a positive image but by the way in which characters are created and the context in which they are shown, they suggest disorder. Images that tell stories, Rego's works are not so close to the conceptual painting as they are to the narrative structure. We always find a story in a Rego's work, a fairy tale or a reality inspired situation. It is not clearly defined, yet we can find interpretations for it. On the other hand, these stories are not simple stories. There is a meaning, not as visible as the imagistic narrative structure, but an idea can be grasped. One of these ideas, underlying the art of the Portuguese creator derives from the synthesis operated in her work. Myth and modern reality placed together in the same painting - Snow White that has eaten from the poisoned apple, and is now choking is presented not in the fairy tale environment, but in modern setting and her sufferance is realistically rendered - may be seen as a means of conveying the idea that life is complex and includes both aspects. The painting may be thus described as an attempt to achieve unity between two aspects that are generally seen as separate. The same idea is rendered in other works by the synthesis of other antithetical elements. The mixture of amusing and horrible or frightening, can be observed in paintings like "The Interrogator's Garden" or "Dog Woman" and "The family." They all make you smile creating at the same time a strange feeling. A work like "The Dance" is a mixture of beauty and ugliness, of happiness and sadness. Dance, by its definition, is an expression of people's joy and the concept leads us to the sphere of beauty. Yet, when contemplating the painting, we don't really feel happy, we rather feel a mixture of depression and good mood. As for the beauty contained in the dance movements, it is eclipsed by the dark aspect of the scene, and by the face expression of the dancers. The woman depicted in the "Dog Woman" painting is not only a mixture of frightening and comic, but also an embodiment of the real woman's antithetical aspects: power and fragility at the same time. As the artist herself says, to picture a woman in this posture is believable, and this is so, exactly because life itself implies a multitude of manifestations. It includes not only beauty and delicacy but also ugliness and power, not only good but also evil, material and spiritual. Life brings together all these elements. A feature of Rego's art is the use of the comic's language in her work. Her art becomes a sequential one. And in order to illustrate this we can make reference to the "Dog and Girl" series, to the Night Stories series or the Nursery Rhyme series. Bibliography 1. Walters, Margaret. "The Ubiquitous Paula Rego." New Statesman 7 February 1997 Read More