Threads of inspiration: Fabric portraits of Female Artists - Paula Rego

The first exhibition I saw of Paula Rego’s work was at the Tate Liverpool in 1996. The gallery was filled with huge pastel drawings of her series ‘Fantasia’ where she used short well proportioned portuguese women as the principle dancers. The images were real and powerful, not skinny perfect bodied dancers, I could identify with these bodies and had not seen anything like it before.

Paula Rego’s work delves into the shadows, its unafraid, raw, visceral visual language that makes you sit up and listen. I think it was Rego’s figuarative work that made me be braver with my own drawings. I have used Rego’s work as a starting point in my own work a number of times. The print from her Peter Pan series where Wendy is sewing peter’s shadow back on because it had come loose, was the beginning of a short film I made called ‘dancing with my shadow.

Rego’s scale and application is extremely powerful using mostly pastels in her work. Rego sets up the scene that she wants to draw and uses her model of many years, Lila Nunes, to pose, along with machetes and soft sculptural figurines that Rego has made, to tell a story that Rego draws.

I encourage you to look up the work of Paula Rego.