The sad news that the artist Paula Rego has died…
I discovered Rego’s work in the late 1980s and it struck me like a hammer. At the time the UK art world tended to be pretty dismissive of figurative painting; a prejudice that stretched from the art schools to the art media. I too was ploughing an abstract painting furrow thinking this was the direction to push in hope of making a career as a ‘serious’ artist.
Even though I wanted to paint figuratively and I wanted to engage with social and political issues in my work I didn’t have the courage to thoroughly break out of the dead aesthetic I was drilling until I saw Rego’s work.
One of the major reasons I make what I make now, both aesthetically and regarding subject matters, is because of the last three and half decades of inspiration her work has given me. She has left a truly individual and astounding body of work that will never be sidelined by future fashions in art.
This painting was well underway when I heard she had died but was finished today, two days after the news of her passing; it would never have existed without her. The only way I can think to mark the sad news is to give it the subtitle ‘a painting for Paula’.
Thank you Paul Rego. May you rest in peace… and well remembered.

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