Power of the pencil

She maintains that she has always been a political artist, since the days of her early collages attacking the Portuguese dictator Salazar. And the main subject of her work has long been the relationships between people, which is really the politics of power. Rego suffers from depression and insists that it is only art that keeps her sane. She certainly keeps busy. The main room of the studio is dominated by an altarpiece she is making for the Foundling Hospital, to be part of an exhibition of three artists, Rego, Tracey Emin and Matt Collinshaw, scheduled for 2010. ‘I went to see the place and I saw the little trinkets that the women left when they left their babies — heartbreaking stories.’ What Rego has made is a kind of portable altar that folds up like a cupboard, containing eight large drawings with a group of figures or props in front. Her habit of drawing from life has recently been extended by creating increasingly complex tableaux. Rego makes figures for these tableaux which are a cross between rag dolls and plaster models. Is she becoming a sculptor? ‘No,’ she says, ‘a prop-maker.’ Last year she exhibited her props for the first time in a show at the Marlborough gallery in New York. Before that she felt that the props she’d made to staff her pictures could only work with people, but now she’d made objects capable of standing alone.

She says: ‘You find out what it is you want to do through the process of doing it. You have an idea beforehand and then on the way it changes, sometimes quite a lot. Then, when you’ve come to the end of the paper, you realise, “Ah, that’s what it was all along.”’ She rejects the idea that she may be a conduit for some external force, like a spirit medium, and emphasises the role of the individual. ‘It’s you who do it. And when you discover what things look like from drawing them, it’s most exciting. You forget everything else because your attention is totally focused on what you’re doing. I’ve always been better at drawing than painting. I just try to get better and better. That is my wish: to be able to draw really well.’

Paula Rego’s new etchings will be launched by Marlborough Fine Art at The London Original Print Fair at the Royal Academy, 22–26 April. A new film on her work by Jake Auerbach called PAULA REGO: telling tales will be released on DVD this spring.