Visiting The House of Stories
The colours for Week 28 are Peach, Warm Brown, Emerald & Powder Blue
Painting is a way of coping with reality, with the everyday world, because when painting, one absorbs all that there is.
Paula Rego
After travelling inland and then onto Porto, we returned towards Lisbon and have been staying in São Pedro De Sintra. Yesterday we took a drive to Cascais to see the Casa das Histórias (House of Stories). This unusual and impressive building was designed by Eduardo Soutou de Moura to house a permanent exhibition of Paula Rego’s work.
Paula Rego (1935-2022) is an artist I continue to admire: her art and her uncompromising stance on women’s rights has been inspirational and refreshing.
Born in Lisbon, Portugal, Rego is widely considered the most important woman artist of the late 20th and into the early 21st century. She was renowned for her powerful narrative paintings that challenged conventions and explored complex themes of power, gender and identity.
Moving from her native Portugal to England, she studied art at the Slade School of Fine Art between 1952 and 1956 which she described as ‘both extremely traumatic and extremely thrilling’. She listened to the head of the school, William Coldstream, who told her to ‘paint what's going on inside your head’.
Her subsequent work is often political in nature, expressing deeply critical view of the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal that ended in 1974.
Rego's paintings drew from fairy tales, folk stories and literature, but she used these familiar narratives to expose darker truths about human nature and society. Her complex works are both beautiful and unsettling, revealing the tensions between fantasy and reality.
Rego gained international acclaim throughout her career, with her work found in the collections of the National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Tate Gallery in London. Her largest retrospective, which I visited, was held at Tate Britain in 2021. Seeing her work close up again yesterday reminded me how viewing original artworks in person is an experience unlike any other.
See a short documentary about Rego at the Tate Britain here, see her Royal Academy profile here (they claim her as British, she’s definitely Portuguese), and read about her ‘deeply political art’ in her profile from The Metropolitan Museum of Art here.
“Centauro”, Collage and oil on canvas, Paula Rego, 1964
Colour Combination
The chosen colours this week are Peach, Warm Brown, Emerald & Powder Blue. Use the colours along with a contrasting dark and neutral light colour if you wish. Create an artwork in any medium or style.
I love seeing what you’ve create. If you’re posting on Instagram, please tag #coloricombo and #estemacleod and join us in the private Facebook group Creative Prompts.