From the Autumn 2022 issue of RA Magazine, issued quarterly to Friends of the RA.

“I need you to make me an octopus,” came the urgent and typically forthright request over the phone, out of the blue from Paula. It was the beginning of a working relationship that gave me the privilege of regular visits to Paula’s studio in Camden, and a rare insight into the picture-making process of her late career. She was kind, wickedly funny and full of energy, always eager to see what I was up to, and at that time we had a special connection, when my sculptures became her props.

The octopus, fashioned from wire, stitched quilting and rubber, was needed for the completion of the right-hand image of a triptych called The Fisherman (2005). These were compositions that were quite literally ‘made’ before being drawn. Paula’s studio setups were a heady mix of cheerfully roughshod papier mâché figures, furniture, fabrics, ornaments, dolls and other miscellaneous objects, which were carefully assembled to enable the real-life models to pose among them. Paula’s live models were selected for their willingness to transform into whatever the work demanded of them, most notably her alter ego, muse and close companion Lila Nunes.

Fiercely generative, Paula revivified the genteel medium of pastel into a weapon of expression. I marvelled at her virtuoso ability to conjure the intense materiality of things with this chalky substance. Stuffed tights, shimmering pink silk and the tentacles of that giant octopus all arrived on the paper at speed and with a breathtaking vividness. “I am not mad about the lyrical quality of the brush,” she said in a 2009 interview. “I much prefer the hardness of the stick… The stick is fiercer, much more aggressive.”

Paula’s work was steeped in the bristling darkness of fairytale structures and women’s oral histories. Love, hate, fear, betrayal, punishment, ambivalence and complexity appear with a boldness and directness in her populated compositions – an outpouring and inventory of her own and the collective unconscious mind. She gleefully subverted the patriarchal language of painting, championing the idealised female form, women’s lived experience and their internal journey.

She was consumed with a belief in the power of pictures, able to springboard from her own internal world to meet the contemporary political moment. In 1998, her tender and unflinching Abortion paintings were first shown at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in her native Lisbon, following the failure to legalise abortion by referendum. In 2007, when images from the series of etchings based on the paintings were published in Portuguese newspapers in the run-up to a second referendum, they had a profound effect, many believing they swayed the result to legalisation. Her large pastel War (2003), now in the Tate collection, depicting two injured and bloodied bunny rabbits, took its starting point from an image in the Guardian newspaper at the start of the Iraq conflict.

But however dark things got, there was always sympathy and sensitivity for each character’s position in Paula’s re-told stories, and often a recourse to absurdity and humour. Some time after I had finished working with Paula, In memoriam Paula Rego RA Sculptor Cathie Pilkington RA pays tribute to the painter’s visual storytelling and recalls her humour amid their own collaborations. I took delivery of a huge picture, a wedding present from her. I unwrapped it eagerly, wondering what she had selected, and then had to laugh. It was an etching that featured an articulated girl dummy I had made for her, titled Night Bride (2009). It was part of her Female Genital Mutilation series. Only Paula could get away with this unusual wedding gift. In the words of Louise Bourgeois,” an artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing”.

Cathie Pilkington RA is an artist. As Keeper of the Royal Academy, she oversees the RA Schools.