Research - Paula Rego - Approaches to Painting

'The best painter of womens' experience alive.' - Robert Hughes

I'm very interested in the work of Paula Rego - both in terms of style and subject matter.  Her visual language employs the female as the key element in her paintings.  Her work is about the lives of women, birth and death, violence, anger, abortion and mutilation.For 'The Dance', completed in 1988, Rego made a large number of preparatory figurative and compositional sketches from memory. Only then were models introduced for the painting of the final piece. Although a contemporary work, the stylizing of the figures draws from her home country of Portugal and much of the story telling within Rego's work came from her Grandmother in Portugal.

Paula Rego - Study for 'The Dance', 1988

Paula Rego - Study for 'The Dance', 1988

Paula Rego - 'The Dance', 1988.

The painting reminds me of Munch's, 'The Dance of Life'.    The circular compostion echoes the circle of life.  The work alludes to courtship, marriage and birth.  The scale of the figures is unusual - a device I have noticed in other works by Rego were she plays around with our perception of what the scale of a figure should be.  This can be disconcerting and adds to the degree of menace within some of her works.


http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/paula-regos-private-world-8465878.html

Above is a link to an interesting article on Rego where she talks about fear being one of the main themes within her work.