Paula Rego had a brutal but often funny and mischievous way of describing life as a painter. Few artists have summed up the experience of confronting the great artists of the past as memorably as her: “I got a feeling of a kind of sinking-bowel syndrome whenever I looked at old masters. I felt uncomfortable.”
She grappled with that visceral response over two years as associate artist at the National Gallery – with a studio appropriately in its bowels – between 1990 and 1992. She produced several major works, including a nine-metre-wide mural for the gallery’s restaurant, Crivelli’s Garden.
