When Paula Rego was nine, she drew her grandmother sitting comfortably in a chair. The old woman’s hair is pinned back, and she wears dangly earrings and thick-rimmed glasses on a chain. She might be reading or sewing – it’s hard to tell. Whatever it is, she’s absorbed in the task at hand. Just like the young artist, who, even as a child, diligently signed and dated her work, in neat script shooting up from the tip of her grandmother’s shoe like a flare in a night sky.
This small, tender sketch is part of the largest exhibition of the Portuguese-born artist’s drawings to date. Curated by her son, Nick Willing, the show features works on paper from the 1950s, right around the time that she settled in Britain, to her death in 2022. Unspooling from lines in pencil, pastel, pen and ink are tantalising tales of people and places real and imagined, and periods in Rego’s own life when she felt afraid, inspired or fierce. Sometimes the tales intertwine. Sometimes they stand alone. They can be mischievous, moving, troubled. All are full of feeling.
