inside paula rego\'s madhouse

At first glance, Paula Rego\'s studio is located behind the big wooden door of a humble warehouse in the town of Kentish, and looks like an explosion in the sale of car suitcases.
Tacky plastic decorations stacked on old tables; second-
Handmade clothing used as model clothing is folded, covered and hung on the sofa;
Monkey and glass toys
The prop \"eye Chinese doll\" in Rego\'s paintings stared sadly from the corner.
In the center of the room, as disturbing as a nightmare, standing two crazy lives --
A mannequin dressed in Victorian women\'s clothing drowned a baby in ridiculeup well. Since the mid-
When she was in her 90 s, she completely gave up smoking and completely stopped her imaginary job.
She linked the two events herself)
This is how Rego painted it.
First of all, she created a scene with her huge \"doll\", more and more props and her regular model Lila Nunes;
Then she drew with a large and meticulous pen of a pencil.
This place is crazy.
Just like walking in the back of the most evil circus you can imagine.
\"But what I \'ve never done is evil,\" Rego, the protest, Kuan-eyed—
Then laugh.
There is no doubt that she is one of the most accessible and successful painters in England.
In her home country, Portugal, the Paula Rego Museum opened later this year in the town of Cascais, outside Lisbon, and she is as famous as a football player.
Rego\'s masterpiece can reach up to £ 500,000.
She still can\'t classify in style and technology.
Her works range from oil paintings and collages to prints and paintings
The only thing that remains the same, however, is its novel intention.
The picture is a fable or a dream.
Like moments in time, dealing with drama, emotions, and complex human characters.
Some are a vague snapshot of Estoril\'s childhood from the coast of Lisbon;
Others expressed feelings about her husband\'s death in 1988.
Many of them are political.
Abortion Travel in 1998, known as \"propaganda\" before the Portuguese referendum on termination of pregnancy \"--
Some works, such as the Jane Eyre series, are adapted from other people\'s works, and she feels particularly closely related to them.
All of these are personal real stories filtered out through Rego\'s often surreal fictional universe.
She is now 74 years old and has been working in this studio every day since she was 9 years old. 30am to 7pm.
\"Painting makes me feel alive,\" she said . \"
\"It\'s not very good to grow old. It\'s obscene.
\"Your energy starts to disappear, you fight and fight, but you know it\'s going to happen and you just want to know when it\'s going to happen,\" she added with a smile . \" I don\'t mean death.
I mean disability.
\"I\'m here to meet Rego and her friend Jack Albach.
The creator and son of another veteran politician artist Frank Albach from northern London.
\"I don\'t know him, but I see him occasionally in Camden M & S,\" Rego said . \" Imagine two international famous seventy-day artists holding a strange image ready
Meals at checkout.
Jack made films about Lucian Floyd, Ron Kitai and John Virtue etc, and spent months last year interviewing and filming a story called storytelling
His strategy is to sit down and have the artists talk about their work in detail, and when Rego explains a series of photos to him with a camera, new insights, anecdotes and explanations are popping up.
But perhaps the most intriguing thing isand shocking —
The review at the end of the movie is correct when Rego is discussing what happens if she stops painting.
\"The psychiatric hospital is waiting,\" she said frankly . \".
\"Yes, a psychiatric institution.
This is a real possibility, not just fear.
\"This is an extraordinary recognition of an artist whose work is often interpreted by psychoanalytic gloss, and most often by Freud.
For example, she portrayed her mother as weeping cabbage and spiders;
In fisherman\'s three, the man with a huge wobbling head is both a pillow inspired by Martin McDonald\'s terrible drama of the same name and her own father.
However, Albach believes that Rego is a \"very smart artist\" and is often considered a teenage intuition.
\"A lot of her work looks instinctive, as if directed by her subconscious mind.
But in fact, she is a person who seriously thinks about things and then takes a stand on things, which is very rare today.
\"Rego never said about her own mental health.
Is she really scared or even looking crazy?
\"Ah,\" she sighed.
\"Well, I\'m a patient with depression.
Frustration is the worst thing for you.
What I\'m talking about is not just sadness or usually frustration, but real things.
This is what I call a mental hospital.
I mean the possibility of real pain. depression]is terrifying.
This is fear itself.
\"Rego was born in Portugal in 1935, shortly after Antonio de Oliveira Salazar became a dictator, when the Portuguese landscape and atmosphere influenced many of her paintings.
This family is very good. off —
However, her father, Jose himself, was often frustrated and sometimes even completely silent.
Rego, who started weekly treatment in her early 70 s, believes she inherited the situation from him.
\"This is at home,\" she told me . \".
\"My father will listen to the BBC in a chair.
He can\'t talk at all.
No dinner or any time, poor little one.
Then at 9, the music began and it was time to sleep.
It is very painful for my mother because she is a lively and lively person.
She said: \"However, Rego always feels that he is closer to his father than his mother.
\"He is a kind man, very free. He let me go.
He told me to go.
Portugal is not a place for women who want to continue their lives, he said, and he is right.
In 1952, she came to London and met Victor Willing, a talented artist at Slade ).
Married though).
When she was a student, she was pregnant and her father immediately drove to London to visit her. she took her back to Portugal without judgment and gave birth to her daughter, she named her Caroline.
Later, Rego was willing to get married with two more children, Victoria and Nicholas.
But it wasn\'t long before he was ill.
Suffering from multiple hardening
And thus began a slow deterioration for more than 15 years.
Although Willing died 20 years ago, now when she talks about him, Rego is in a state of tension.
\"I don\'t think it\'s hard to talk about Vic.
I was jealous of him.
He is a much better painter than me.
\"It seems to me that much of Rego\'s work involves male disease and impotence in women who are trying to cure them.
The most important person in her life.
Victor Kenn and Jose Rego
Both have suffered from a ruthless, weak environment, and rego seems best to deal with the experience through her work.
One of her most mysterious and seductive paintings, family, is centered on a man in a suit and a half
Surrounded by three women.
One is an adult, smirking with his jacket sleeve.
A little girl, turned around, apparently rubbing herself insinuably, and the third girl stood by the window alone, holding her hands tightly together, perhaps praying.
Rego revealed that the man is Vic and the woman is desperate to make him recover.
\"But who can be besides Vic?
\"She asked, as if it was nonsense to suggest anything else.
\"Women are trying a miracle.
The little girl with her back against the window is a magical little girl, but she can\'t make him better either.
Therefore, art itself is the most effective treatment for Rego.
She was treated for depression and she couldn\'t work at all when it was too bad, but \"work also helped me face terrible things \".
She felt \"clean\" when she finished a painting.
\"I feel much younger.
It\'s not a relief, it\'s a pure feeling.
It feels like I\'m getting rid of something.
Rego smiled a little shyly.
Leila Nunes, the model that Rego calls \"collaborators and Playmates\", has also been watching.
Nunes came to England from Portugal in the middle
Over the past few years, he was in his 80 s willing to help nurses, but stayed after his death and has been sitting in Rego since then.
\"My way out of Vic\'s terrible nightmare of death is to tie Leila up with a ribbon, slowly unscrew her rope and unscrew her.
The more I solved her, the more normal my life would be . \"
It is metaphorical to solve.
At 1994, Rego drew the Dog Girl series, one of which showed Nunes sleeping on the owner\'s coat --
In fact, Willing\'s suit coat.
\"The picture of the dog woman brought us a lot of memories,\" she told olbach in the movie . \".
\"I contacted him again. do you understand what I mean?
Very, very good.
\"If this movie can do one thing, I hope Paula is starting to be described as a great artist, not a great female artist,\" said Albach . \"
I think there will be unnecessary ghettoisation sometimes.
She is a British artist with an international audience and reputation and I think she is great.
Rego nodded his appreciation.
But they\'re all busy people.
Jack had to go and sit down for his father because he did this every week since he was a teenager.
Rego has work to do with her horrible woman drowning her baby.
They are a model of a painting commissioned by the abandoned museum in the fields of Coran --
At the old orphanage in Bloomsbury, single mothers leave their children there.
In this picture, however, Rego chose to portray a more frightening moment of abandonment --
Infanticide itself.
It seems to me to be the classic Rego: memorable, eye-catching and weird challenge.
Jack Albach\'s film Paula Rego: storytelling will be released on Amazon on August 10. co. uk, price £10. 98.
Other artist films in Albach include Lucian Floyd, Alan Jones, Walter siquhart, and Frank Albach.