Nick Willing on Paula Rego

Hello everyone and welcome back to season 6 of the Great Woman Artist podcast. In this series I am so excited to be continuing my partnership with the brilliant Alighieri Jewelry who have been supporting the GWA podcast for the last year and a half. The spring summer 2022, Alighieri is releasing one piece at a time from their Inferno unlocked. This collection will open up the Inferno and give you the tools to guide you from the darker circle of hell to a realization of light and clarity. Hell is often imagined as a land of fire, however in the final circle of the Inferno, ice rains supreme. The landscape is completely frozen over and the souls are locked in. There is stasis, no ability to move forward or to hope. This week I am so excited to tell you the story of the first piece to be released. The multifaceted poet's dagger with its hidden codes and verses is an amulet strong enough to break through the ice of the Inferno. It is a tool of strength and perseverance to guide you to a realization of light and clarity. One of the 33 magical spells of the Inferno unlocked collection where it to shatter the status quo. Alighieri will be dropping each amulet individually to celebrate the craftsmanship and story at the core of every talisman which founder, Rochmotani, carves by hand. Collect the keys to the Inferno on the @Alighieri_Jewelry Instagram and just for our listeners Alighieri is offering a 10% discount across all products with the code T-G-W-A at Checkout. Go to www.alighieri.co.uk for more. I hope you enjoy this episode. Hello everyone and welcome to the Great Woman Artists podcast with me, Katie Hessel. Some of you might know me from the Great Woman Artists and Instagram account I set up an October 2015 which celebrates female artists on a daily basis ranging from young graduates to old masters. Well, in a similar fashion to the Instagram, this podcast is all about celebrating female artists from a variety of backgrounds and histories. And I am so excited to be interviewing artists on their career or artists, writers, curators or general art lovers on the women artists who means most of them. What I want this podcast to do is celebrate female artists and all different capacities so you, the listener, can gain a look into the greatest female artists working now or from art history. I am so excited to say that my guest on the Great Woman Artists podcast is the director, writer and son of the artist we will be discussing today, Nick Willing. Critically acclaimed for both his popular fantasy television shows and theatrically released movies, socialist, realist dramas and feature documentaries. At the core of Nick's work is his fascination with innovative storytelling and it was this fascination which proved especially poignant after he spent a year interviewing and filming his mother. The acclaimed painter and one of the greatest living artists, Paula Rago, for his outstanding and highly moving award-winning documentary secrets and stories, a film which didn't only allow him to better understand his mother's work. The life she led in her youth under Salazar's dictatorship in Portugal, her experiences at the Slade School of Art in the 50s and her relationship with her artist husband and Nick's father, Victor Willing, but fueled his interest to go and make further artist-based documentaries, including one of the acclaimed artist Sean Scully. But the reason why we are speaking with Nick today, I should add, in the North London studio of his mother, is because Rago is currently the subject of one of the most powerful exhibitions in London right now. A major retrospective of her work at Tape Britain, featuring paintings, drawings, collages and more spanning from the 1950s up until recent years. Rago's works have dealt with both epic and personal stories, on large and small scales. Painting our deepest secrets, desires, fears or the familiar stories we learnt and childhood but questioned as adults, freedom, family dynamics, art history and so much more. I don't think there is a single artist whose works have captured me so much. After all, she has said, "Art is the only place you can do it you like. That's freedom." Nick Willing, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today? I'm very, that was very good. Thank you. Wow. Yes, I'm very well. Thank you. Good. So, thank you so much for having us here at the studio today. But also congratulations to you and your mother on this fantastic exhibition. I mean, never have I witnessed genuinely paintings so powerful, so epic, so real, so truthful. I think I spent at least two hours on the exhibition, just being an awe and at least struck by the sheer scale and depth of the work, the way that she documents through paint, the reality of suffering, of being a woman, of relationships, our fears, secrets, desires. But what I find incredible is that although so many images are personal to her, they also speak universally. They span time, age, cultures. They feel utterly contemporary, but also historic. So I want to start off by asking you, how did you feel walking into that exhibition and seeing so much of your mother's work in front of you? Oh, it was wonderful. One to see so many old friends come together. I mean, for me, I grew up with those pictures. In the 60s when I was a little boy, those were the things that, well, took my mother away from me. So, in some ways, they feel like old brothers and sisters come back together again and you know, a kind of strange reunion. They were also the pictures from which I learnt about art, I suppose you don't learn about art, you experience art and it is that experience, those feelings that inform the way you understand painting. So it's quite emotional seeing all those pictures together, but there's another thing and that is that it's quite symbolic for my mother because she, as a female painter, has always been disregarded by the art establishment over the years. I mean, I'm going back a few years, but throughout the 80s, 90s, naughties, into quite recent times, it was a world almost exclusively dominated by men, male artists and my mother was knocking at that door throughout that time wanting to be a part of it and always overlooked. People didn't even know that she was knocking, I don't think. And so, finally, by recognising an artist that has been working since the early 50s at the height of her parents for so many decades, to finally recognise her and put her alongside the likes of Lucian Freud and David Hockney and such, that's also very moving. And in the exhibition was there a particular work that has always spoken to you and if there was one, can you tell us which one and what it means to you? Well, there are many, many pictures. I mean, you can sort of chart my life through her work too because I've grown up with it. And my entire relationship with my mother has been formed through the prism of her work, if you will, because the way to relate to my mother was to talk about her work, or to talk about the things that fueled her work, films, books, the stuff that interested her. That's what she was passionate about. And so, that was the way into getting to know her and to forming a strong bond with her. And I recognised that from the age of five or younger. So naturally, all those pictures have a pattern. There is one that is special to me because it's, I think, one of the only ones I've posed for. Oh, wow. It's called the dance. It's a quite a large picture in the 80s. My father was very ill and she decided to make a picture of a dance, but she drew a lot of women initially, her sketches for the early designs of that painting were women dancing in a circle, much as they do in Portuguese fares, dressed in Portuguese costume. And that had sort of sparked something inside her and she didn't know what and she took it, this drawing to show my dad, as she often did with all her work, because he was the opinion that most mattered to her. And he said, oh, it's a bit boring, why don't you put some men in there and she thought about it and thought, wow, okay, good idea. And not because she wanted necessarily to include men, but because she suddenly realised that she could make it about him and her life with him. So what developed was a story, in other words, that she wanted to paint the cycles of her life from being a little girl, growing up, to meeting Vic, my father and falling in love with him. And then there's another couple, which is Vic dancing with a lover, the one with blonde hair, who's obviously not my mother. And then finally, a woman all on her own, large figure dressed in Portuguese costume. But unfortunately, my dad was very sick and bad. And he couldn't pose for her and also he looked old and she wanted a young version for him. And at that time, it just so happens that I looked very much like him, so she said, would you pose for me? So I dressed in his suit and put on his shoes and danced with Lila in the living room, but also in her studio, as she did preparatory sketches. And then I went to her studio in Barry Street in Clarkamwell for the picture. And then my dad died. And that was a big deal for all of us. I mean, he was very ill so. It was a relief, but it was also a huge shock because he was such an important figure in all our lives, particularly in my mother's life, because she sometimes says that she did whatever he told her to do. It's not true. She never did what anybody told her to do. She was very quick to give the credit to other people, but actually she often used people so that she could do the opposite of what they suggested. She's very contrary to my mother and rather capricious, and she never listened to anybody really but herself. In fact, in his parting note to her, he said, "Trust yourself, and you will be your own best friend." So she said about trying to trust herself and said, "Come back, we've got to carry on with the picture." Of course, now for me, my dad's just died dressing up as him and dancing with a cheating lover, felt a bit like a betrayal of my own. That was a tough summer for me because, obviously, pretending to be my dad for her picture was difficult, but I realized that it would help her because my mother, the way she gets over anything is through her work, and she was trying to go over his death by getting this picture right. At the end of it, she gave me one of the drawings she did as a study of me for my birthday. She gave me this drawing, and I have it on my wall in my office at home, and I look at it every day. It looks exactly like me, but for some reason I only see my father in it. You know, the thing that my mother does that I think is important, that I began to understand properly after interviewing her for so many weeks and months while making that film. Every Saturday, I did an interview with her for a year. Amazing. I had most of those interviews I couldn't use because she lied all the time, or she didn't want to say, or she didn't want to tell me whatever it was. Eventually, she would tell me what I knew to be the truth. Sometimes truth I didn't know, so it was quite a revelation. One of the things that I began to understand is that the way she works is that she is inspired by a classic story, perhaps Jane Eyre, or Padro Amaro, Peter Pan, the nursery rhymes. But then when she starts working on them, they start to change. The story starts to change the picture, starts to change the story for her. And the reason it changes is because they start to scratch an itch from her own psyche, from her past. And a personal element, her own story starts to dominate. And she realizes, as she's making these pictures, that the reason that she's so interested in doing Jane Eyre, whatever it is, is because there's something in her past or in her life that she's still unresolved. She uses the picture to work it through, and better understand what it is that's lurking her. So the pictures are personal explorations of her own psyche, but laid in a set, like in a play of somebody else's conception. But also what I find so interesting about her, using those such familiar stories as well as the reality of what they actually are as well, and the way that they've placed women in the world, and treated women. And these kind of familiar stories that we always just think are stories, and then she not only uncovers her personal story, this lost boy, Peter Pan, actually what happened here, and there's a lot of displacement within that. And actually they're very haunting stories. Snow White in the Seven Dwarfs is actually, it's very odd. Yeah, that's right. There are all specific things attached to those pictures that you've mentioned. Snow White in the Seven Dwarfs, that's one of her most important films, the Disney films now in the Seven Dwarfs. She thought it was the most amazing thing when she saw it as a little girl. She couldn't believe it moving drawings. She thought it was the most magical thing she'd ever seen, and it encouraged her to draw and draw and draw and draw. But when she comes to do Snow White, she is taken back to her early puberty. And her early puberty is filled with embarrassment and enforced feelings of shame that are brought about by her mother in particular. But it's also cast at a time of the Portuguese dictatorship where Salazar, the fascist dictator, his philosophy entered every aspect of family life. What you're supposed to say, what you're supposed to think, and it was utterly repulsive, a weird time in which she grew up. So she invokes those feelings in pictures like the Snow White pictures. There's one very particular famous one called Snow White and her stepmother in which the stepmother is taking the knickers of Snow White to check if there's any stain in them because she's been up to something. That feeling of shame and embarrassment brought about by her mother into those pictures. This is what she does. She's exploring the feelings that she had, and of course she's a woman. The feelings of women and they take a center stage. Yes, and I think that's the power of her workers that she explores these such personal subjects, full of trauma, but full of reality as well. She confronts them. She deals with them head on and doesn't shy away from anything which is why her paintings speak to anyone because they deal with real life experiences. I want to go back to her real life experiences. I want to go back to the beginning of her life. I mean Paula Rago was born in 1935 as an only child to middle class parents in Lisbon in Portugal three years after Salazar's dictatorship had come into place, which lasted until 1968. An extremely oppressive society for a woman to go up in. I mean, tell us about her childhood and family. I mean, who were her parents? Was art always present in her life? Yes, she liked singing. Her grandfather would ask her to stand on a box and sing for him and his friends. She loved dressing up. This is a little, little girl. Her parents, when she was one year old, had to move to London for a year and a half, 18 months, leaving little Paula Rago in the care of their grandparents. It's a very important thing to leave a kid at that early age. It crosses all sorts of difficulties. And when they came back, she didn't know who they were. Oh my gosh. But she loved her grandparents and then she had to go and live with these other two people. This is how she told the story. It was quite funny. But I guess it wasn't funny for her. It was a bit traumatic. And her father, she absolutely adored because he was very funny, had an incredible sense of humor. He was an atheist. He hated the church because of the oppression. Her mother, on the other hand, was a devout Catholic. So there was this contradiction in the household. And although she admired her father most of all, she also became a Catholic and went to communion expecting that it would create some sort of revelation that something would open up in her heart and her life would be transformed. Of course, nothing happened. But her mother also was a painter. She was a very skilled painter. She would paint things very, very quickly, my mother would say, we have some of her paintings. Beautiful little things that she would dash off in her a few minutes. So my mother as a tiny child would take an easel and walk behind her and set up her easel. Wow. And watch her paint in the hope that she might get close to her mother. She didn't do because she wanted to paint at that stage just to get close to her mom. However, she did start to draw when she was about three or four. And my grandmother, her mother would tell me that when she heard this noise, she knew that my mother was captivated because that's this noise that my mother would make when she drew. And she'd go into this kind of almost like a trance. And she'd be there and she didn't know she was making a noise by the way. And she would be there for hours drawing in her room. That's when she was four or five. And she continued making that noise until quite recently a couple of years ago. She was still making that noise when she drew. And that's when you know that she's hit the zone. That's incredible. And then when did her sort of fascination with stories begin as well? Because I mean, how works equally about storytelling? And I'm around thinking that her father would sort of scare her with Dante Inferno, but also introduce her to Disney at the time. Yes, she loves stories and storytelling and reading. She's particularly keen on poetry. And even now, if you were to ask her to recite any poem, she'd rattle off the whole thing. It's quite an astonishing thing she does. She's 86 and yet she knows she loves Cole Rich, W.H. Orden for some reason is her favourite at the moment. And that's something from her childhood. When she was at school in San Juliang, St. Julien, in Kirkland. of Algenele Lisbon, she would enter into the poetry competitions and win every time. And she also drew and painted a little girl there and was highly encouraged by the staff who saw already that she had talent. You know, looking at her work, I think you see how just by keeping at it, working really hard and being passionate about what you do, how much better you get every single year that you keep doing it. You see a transformation, it's not like it's all there at the beginning. It isn't all there at the beginning. My father used to say you never get better, you just get better at it. And what he meant was that you're born with all that you need and all you learn is technique and how to translate that into achieving what you want to achieve. However, that in itself is a great achievement. And she has got better at it, her technique has really improved so by the time you look at her pastels in the late 90s and early 90s, it's quite an extraordinary thing. Yeah, oh my goodness, that room was just astonishing. But I mean, when she was 16 she was sent to boarding school and then she went to the slade in about 1952. I mean, what was this experience like for her in the sense that she's grown up in this dictatorship and she suddenly, by herself in London, what there was freedom at the slade? Well, she was lucky that she had a very liberal and progressive father, which is extremely rare. I would say particularly in Portugal at that time, she was the only child, a daughter. And he believed in her. But he said that we've got to get you out of this country because Portugal is no place for a woman and it's true. At that stage, women were not treated well and women were expected to look after the men, take care of the men, have the babies and do whatever they were told, obedience was the most important quality in a woman. In fact, a lot of her pictures about playing with the notion of obedience, and this is something that comes from that period, and my grandfather had further recognised this and said, okay, we've got to put you in England, which is England is the most liberal country, and it was true. You know, it had a completely different justice system. It was still a sexist country, but it was more progressive. So he sent her to a finishing school in Seven Oaks, where she learnt how to walk with balancing a book on her head and how to get out of a car without showing handicals and that sort of stuff. Quite of a day, levels. All the important things in the 1950s. She was very young, she was 17. But she wanted to go to art school, that's all she wanted to do. And we have a letter where she writes to my grandfather and says that her teacher and head mistress of her finishing school at Seven Oaks didn't think she should go to art school because it's not a thing that women do. And so she's writing it to her dad to have permission because she needs the permission. Because in those days, women couldn't move. You know, they couldn't leave Portugal without the permission of either their husband or their father's until 1974 and we have the letter where he responds and saying, yeah, you go for it. I'm setting you up so that you can go and apply to these art schools. Go for it. I mean, wow. The slave wouldn't have her, unfortunately. So she went to Chelsea and showed her pictures there, her portfolio and they thought really good and let her in, but her guardian at the time told her father that Chelsea was not a good place for a woman because they always get pregnant there. So he sent her back to the slave and she did get a position at the slave to go part-time initially. Of course, she went every day, 12 hours a day. Couldn't get her out of there. Where she sat in the live room while Lucian Freud was teaching. Wow. She said he taught by telepathy because he didn't speak. He would just stand behind you. She said he was the most beautiful man she'd ever seen and he'd stand for a long time looking at your picture and then move on and never say a word to anyone. So she thought he was teaching by telepathy. Her teacher there was William Townsend who she loved absolutely was a wonderful tutor. And the head of the school was William Cole's stream and they came to her one day and they said we've got this terror artist called Lowry who's popped down to London and none of the students want to see him. He's supposed to be teetering them but would you go and see what she's said. Yeah. I'll go see it. So she went to meet Lowry and showed him her pictures and you know what he said? He said, wow. I couldn't do that. I couldn't do that. Wow. And asked if he could buy one of them. Wow. Oh my God. Which was of course huge encouragement for a young girl who didn't have the confidence then that you need in order to keep going. Yeah. But she did. She kept going and she worked enormously hard at the slate. But I mean the work that she was even making around this time. I mean I was so struck by portrait of her father in the first row of the exhibition. I mean she must have been about 19 at that time and the kind of depth that she's looking at her father in. I mean it's just extraordinary. Well, that picture is a picture of depression because her father suffered from depression very badly and Paula also inherited that depression. It's something unfortunately runs in our family and he would come home each day and not speak sometimes. He would just sit very quietly and eat his dinner and then listen to the BBC World Service on the radio and wouldn't say a word and would be consumed by sometimes dark depression. And in those days they didn't really understand what that was and mental health issues were considered shameful. Of course things thankfully have changed a lot since then. And Paula also had inherited that darkness but she didn't know what it was. She called it fear. She was afraid of everything. She was afraid of leaving the house. She was afraid of meeting people. She was just terrified and that is a symptom of depression. So when she's 19 she's painting his depression and that's what she's trying to get. And you know that picture lives or has lived is now in the Tate showing it I think for the first time. It's lives usually in her bedroom on the floor because she uses it not as a painting by her but by a picture of him. She uses it as a picture of her father so that she can remember him and remember what he was like. But I mean also she always talks about her greatest achievement at this time as well. Which was winning the first prize at Slade. Yes she was. Summer prize. Summer prize was a lauded thing. All the artists competed for it was very important. And she did a picture called Under Milk Wood which is in the exhibition of the Tate. And it's a poem by Dylan Thomas. She didn't read the poem then she didn't know that poem ironically even though she was such a fan of poetry. She just wanted to make a painting so she made a painting she asked somebody what's it about. This is about a fishing village. She said oh I know about fishing village. I was brought up in one. So she is a Portuguese story really of women. But there also is also a picture of making the women the heroes of the painting. Yeah. And so around this time as well she met your father but I believe he was married already and then in 1957 went to go back to live in back to Portugal. I mean why did they choose to come back to a country that was still under in a dictatorship? My father was married to a ballet dancer called Hazel. And although he didn't act as if he was married, he acted as if he was single. He met my mother at a party and they had a rather tough first encounter where they made love but it was half-consensual I think. She obeyed him because she thought that's also she wanted to make love at that stage. So it's a complicated, consensual moment but she was left quite rattled after that and then she went, she was watching a movie. My mother used to watch three movies a day when she was sometimes, you know, the slate. She'd get a big family pack of ice cream and sit there watching film onto film and she wouldn't ever leave. But on one occasion she was halfway through the film and she said I got to get out of here. I've asked her this. Will you enjoy the film? Yes but I just knew I had to leave. And at the moment she exited the cinema there was my father walking across the road with his friend that painted my country. And of course in those days people didn't have telephones. He had already left the slate. There was no way of seeing him again or meeting him again. She didn't know where he lived and no idea. This is how they met properly as he was crossing the road and he said ah, I've been thinking and wondering where I might see you come with me. I want to paint you. So off she went with him to his studio in Cheney walk and he said we will have to do it nude so she took all the clothes off and she painted her and did other things later. But then she started to enjoy the relationship more because, you know, he was a star of the slate. He was very good friends with Frances Bacon. So he painted her and she started a wild affair with him which lasted and lasted and lasted and lasted. And of course ironically she went to the slate so she wouldn't get pregnant. [BLANK_AUDIO] get pregnant several times. And as I found out in making my film, the only way that she knew to get out of that was to have backstreet abortions, which were very brutal, very, very brutal things. But she felt at the time she had no other choice. She felt that the humiliation of being pregnant in a country like Portugal going back with baby would have denied her the possibility of becoming an artist. And that's all she wanted. And there was no proper form of contraception that she recognized. But men don't at that time didn't take any of that seriously. So it was a difficult time for her, I think. But she also was incredibly and passionately in love with Victor Willing. I mean, I saw this growing up as my sister's did. And we grew up thinking that this was what married people would be like, that they would be so sort of consumed with love for each other and lust for each other, that's what we should expect. Wait, it's not quite like that with everybody. They had a sort of a special relationship, I think. It's true that he was unfaithful as was she, but they were different times than 1960s and 70s. Although I think that was very difficult for her, nevertheless. She did take love as well when he did. But I think she would probably have been quite happy just to be with him. Yeah. But I mean, being back in Portugal, I mean, the work that she was making at this time were incredible things like Salazar vomiting and the homeland. These are really kind of quite violent, quite messy scenes. And I mean, what must have been like, I mean, to be an artist, really making these quite kind of, I guess, offensive scenes about the minute she just dictates ship who she was living on. I mean, well, she's not scared about being caught out at this time, the work that she's making here is really quite bold. The thing about my mother is that she felt she could do anything in painting. And she was scared in her life, in her private life and her personal life. She was very shy, you know, wouldn't talk freely until she was in her 50s, which she sort of speak her mind. And also, there were very oppressive times socially. So women were not encouraged to speak their minds anyway. So the pent up feelings of injustice and anger at not only society, but maybe her family life and such had to come out. And the way they came out was through her painting. So in her art, she was completely fearless. This is the compensation for that which she couldn't do in her own life, her private life. And that's always been the case. Her mother used to say, Oh, you see, you've done that painting and now you're embarrassed. Look, now what are you going to do about it? And she would she'd get embarrassed and cry on dear, what have I done? But actually, those were the pictures that often were of best pictures. Yeah. Because they would get it an emotion. I mean, all great art is about emotion, isn't it? Movies, literature, poetry, music. They're just about hitting a powerful emotion, honestly, with authenticity. And if you can get that out of you and put it on a canvas, bloody hell, that's what she did. And what was interesting is that there she was surrounded by at that time, the people who would come to visit, you know, luminaries of the art realm, who were friends of my father. And they sit around talking about art with incredible sort of seriousness and importance. And she'd listen and not understand a word they were saying often, or if she understood it, just not brave enough to speak up anyway. But what she was doing was painting and painting and painting and painting and painting. And that in time is what reveals itself. Because those artists are all gone. And she's the only one left standing because she's a real artist. And that's what a real artist is is somebody that just does their thing. They don't need to talk about it. They don't need to explain it. They just do it. And that's what she's done her whole life. And she was able to do that in the 60s because she was fearless in her art. She did have to escape Portugal many times. She bought a house with the help of her father because she didn't have any money herself. But her father was quite wealthy because he had a firm that printed all the schedules and the tickets for the Portuguese train service. And by night he would steal into the printing offices and print anti-fascist literature. Can you imagine if he'd been caught he would have been killed? But he was pretty fearless as well. He fought the fascist dictatorship all his life. Her great sadness is that he didn't see the revolution when it finally came in '74. He died in '66, which broke a heart. All he wanted was to see Portugal become a democracy. Anyway, she had to escape many times to London. And the majority of her pictures were actually painted in London. And their criticisms and attacks on the Portuguese dictatorship, but they are actually done as an exile from another country. And she often talks about that and says that you know it was much easier painting in London. That's why she's loves London. When you ask her what is she, she says I'm a Londoner. Are you English? No, I'm a Londoner. And what that means is that what London offered her was a place to work without ghosts. You know, when she was in Portugal and she'd go and try and draw and paint in Portugal, all the ghosts of her childhood, all those ghosts of people telling her what she shouldn't do, what she mustn't think, what she mustn't say, what she mustn't do, what she mustn't feel, all those come crowding in on her and it's much more difficult to work. In London, she says there are no ghosts in London. That's the good thing about it. It's just taxi cabs and good restaurants. Amazing. But then she does eventually move here. But also in the 80s, she creates one of my favourite series of works. I guess she starts making these incredible works on paper, paintings. I mean, her work really moved from these kind of collage, operatic, theatrical scenes. I mean, it's so fascinating that you mentioned she watches three movies a day because some of those ones, like the raft or the Vivian girl as windmills, they are like these kind of operatic stage-like scenes, sort of comic strips almost. Yes. I mean, that the comic strip thing is a very good touchstone because what happened in 81 is that she was liberated. Up until then, she was making these collages, the pictures I personally I love them. But she looks at them with disgust because she feels that she's trying to make art. And the thing she hates most in life is making art. She thinks that's the worst thing any artist should do is to try and make art. And what happened in 81 is that a friend of hers, called Jean-Penalvo, is a very fantastic friend of hers, Portuguese artist also, came to see her in the studio and she painted a lovely monkey and he said, "What are you going to do with this monkey?" She said, "I'm going to cut it up and put it in." They said, "I cut up this lovely monkey." "Oh, that's so cruel. Why don't you just leave the monkey?" She said, "I can't do that." He says, "Yes, you can. It's the 80s. You can do whatever you like now." And that's what happened in the 80s. There was a sudden shift in the art world which meant that there was a kind of freeing up so that you didn't have to make art. You could just make whatever you wanted. And so she was suddenly, there was this explosion where she realized she could just paint whatever she wanted and she could tell stories and operas and she could paint and paint and paint and not worry about making art. What she means by that is make something that is regarded as a work of art because that is self-conscious. It makes you self-conscious and it makes you want to try and do something that maybe somebody else has already done. And then it looks rubbish because it's inauthentic. It's not yours. It doesn't feel right for you. You're sure I'm trying to do something that you think somebody else might like and regard as art as opposed to what you want really want to do. What she really want to do is play and she played and played and she did the operas and she did the Vivian girls and she did all these amazing things. And she was churning out pictures at that stage. It was one of her most prolific periods. Yeah, but I mean it's so funny. I mean just being surrounded by all of her props and clothes and everything. It is a bit like being in a stage set or the kind of you kind of feel like you're in the back of a theatre here. Yes. She has a huge collection of costumes. She has, for instance, the dress she wore when she got married in 1959, which she used. I'll show you. It's got a pattern. She calls a lapic castle, but it isn't anything like a castle. And when she got married in that dress, she was pregnant with my sister, Vicki. So when she came to do a picture about how she felt getting married, it's called love because she was so much another my father. But she got Vicki, the girl she was pregnant with at the time, to wear this dress she was wearing. I'm a. pose in love and it's a picture that's in one of the rooms at the Tate Love, the pastel made in 94 it's one of the dog women. That's Vicki very much in love but actually it's a picture of mum very much in love. Wow. But I mean also around this time in the 80s she not only begins to start getting recognition but also she creates this extraordinary series of these girls with these animals and I mean especially girl lifting her skirt to a dog. I mean this is when these sort of shadows start to appear and where these kind of unsettling, it feels much more truthful these ones as well and sort of who are these animals? What are these sort of animals as caricatures? Why is this girl lifting up her skirt? They become very uncomfortable and it's so interesting the way that she incorporates animals. I mean what do you think triggered this? Well a dog is a symbol of loyalty and obedience. We know that that's you know anyone has a dog knows the most loyal and obedient thing in their life is the dog. A dog is also somebody who's in the lowest pecking order of your life. So these are pictures really about how she is testing her loyalty and obedience to Vicki because she started affairs, one very important affair with Rudy who was fantastic for her. I have to say he was a very glamorous man and he would take her on these trips to see the Botticelli's known Florence and such and to Venice and to Rome and to the Prado and oh my god and she had never really been to Europe in that way and seen all those things because she never had the money for it. We were always broke you know I couldn't pay the milkman often so she wouldn't be able to go away on these fancy trips and see the great masters and that really transformed her life. But she left at home a very very sick ailing Vicki and so she felt very conflicted you know as you would. So these are pictures where she is exploring those feelings of how her loyalty to Vicki is being tested there's a particular series which is included in the exhibition in that wonderful dark blue room which is a girl and dog pictures of a girl looking after a dog and a dog is sick really and so she's having to shave the dog because the dog can't shave itself it's having to feed the dog medicine so she has to prize the jaws of the dog open in order to get the medicine into the mouth and such and really what she's doing is is she's painting pictures of how she feels about Vicki. The last in the series is called the Little Murderous and that's a picture of my girlfriend Michelle posed for that and she has stockings wrapped around her knuckles and she's going to strangle the dog that's out of frame now and that's the last where she decides okay that's it I'm going to kill this faithfulness finally and I'm going to not feel bad about being with the guy I'm with. But I mean when you enter this room it's just kind of remarkable because although these works are clearly very personal to her they also feel so personal to me as a viewer going around I mean it's the kind of temptation or the kind of possibility of so many things that we can do and the fact that she uses this girl who you know as a sort of 27 year old woman I know what it feels like to be a sort of 14 year old girl or something and in a way that 14 year old girl never actually leaves me which also I find interesting that she kind of uses this girl who's on the kind of cusp of puberty but also just the kind of possibilities that we can all do or the tension between the rake and the girl sleeping I mean it's as though this seems almost kind of happening before our eyes and we can tell what's about to happen to kind of left of the scene and also it's just the possibility that we could all be the little murderous but do we ever do it no it's just the kind of fact that there's a possibility and I think that's what is the power of her workers that she shows us what can be possible and she shows us whatever on actually things. Yeah well you get it but you know I've learnt many things from my mother you know all by mistake she never intended to teach me anything she teaches everyone everything well she doesn't she's a terrible teacher and she actually did teach her art school two times and she hated it because she always says what she thinks people want to hear so that's not really very good for teaching you learn by example the single biggest thing I've learnt from my mother is that by painting something very particularly personal to you you will produce or in her case she produced work that anyone can universally understand and that's the key to filmmaking writing every art form is that in order to do something that all people can identify with you have to tap into something that's just yours and that seems like a contradiction in terms doesn't it but actually one thing leads to the other if you try and do something that's universal you know it comes like Esperanto you know it's a mix of every language and nobody can understand it. I always think if you kind of if you think something's relevant and someone at the chances are that someone else will but I mean this room in the tape written exhibition is just kind of it's epic these kind of epic scales that she uses these kind of epic themes yet they all these very personal individual works as well and just the sheer volume of it in a way interestingly I know the dancers in the tape collection but I do I've seen sort of countless images of it my whole life but never actually realized it was that scale and it just almost eats you up in a way and I love the fact that she uses these very personal seeds that we've all been in that situation we all know what that feels like when someone else you like looks at someone else and the fact that she gets that and elevates it to that scale it makes it so real but I mean then we get to this one of my favorite series of the whole show but also hurt in general is the pastels the stories of women and especially dog women I always think looks like a sort of woman trying to get out of a glass case and you could almost hear her roar and the wind that goes with that war but also in the 1990s she began to make these series of works called abortion pastels which are some of the most remarkable works I think in the history of art can you tell us about this and how this came about well actually they're called untitled yes they are yeah sorry because but they know that we do call them abortion series but because they're about backstreet abortions it's just that she called them at the time untitled it's sort of like that she felt that when she had them she couldn't talk about it it's a word you couldn't utter almost I mean they're in hugely important works I remember being at Sunday lunch where she was so furious because it was 1997 and the Portuguese referendum which was held that week to legalize abortion not enough people had voted in order to change the law it's a rule in many referendums that unless you pass a certain benchmark it doesn't count because not enough of the population has voted she was so incensed like this because she had spent her life with women all that you know who had suffered so much from abortions whose daughters mothers sisters aren't you name it had either been killed by backstreet abortions or had been scarred irreparably for the rest of their lives or had had you know traumatic experiences and she always felt that this is something that should be done properly in a clinic is a matter of human health it's not a matter of politics it's a matter of human health she was furious and the way she coped with that injustice and anger was by setting about painting a series of pictures of backstreet abortions now it's very important to say that at the time she denied having any abortions yeah and the reason she did that in lots of interviews is because she didn't want the press to distract and say oh this is really about her she wanted it to be about every woman and so that the issue takes center stage in my film she finally for the first time admitted to having actually had abortions in her teen years and she had many of them in order she felt to save herself and it is that personal experience that she uses in painting those pictures but it's also true that she says that when she started posing those girls in those positions she said to herself oh my god these are slayed life studies because when she was enslaved in the 50s the women would often be posed in those positions wow and suddenly she made a connection because a lot of her friends and a lot of the women that she was at the stage with all had to have abortions in order to get on with their lives backstreet abortions so there was this personal correlation between her personal experience at the slayed and her subsequent experiences but there's also this [BLANK_AUDIO] sense of tremendous injustice at a country denying women this basic human right. So she casts mostly school girls or young girls, some in school uniforms, recovering from backstreet abortions. Also, but I mean, the way that I look at it as well is that they ask school girls, but they also, some of them kind of feel like middle-class mothers or you know, it's the fact that every woman goes through that. Exactly. Exactly. It's every woman that goes through this. Now, it's the poor women in Portugal that had the ten kids already. They had no money to feed these kids and they would turn up at the gate in E.D. Saida in our house in E.D. Saida and ask my mother to lend the money so they could have a backstreet abortion because they already had ten kids and they couldn't feed those ten kids. It was everybody. But what was particularly astonishing, I think, for an artist's CV, if you will, was that when Portugal redid the referendum in 2007, she showed these pictures at the Gulbenkin and she did a series of prints as well, so that they could go to lots of different galleries and exhibitions throughout the country so more people could see them. And I interviewed the president at the time and he said, "Yeah, that made a big difference." I remember being at the Gulbenkin and seeing women whispering to each other knowingly, knowingly because they had one or they daughter or mother or whatever. And so they were being forced to talk about and confront something which was a taboo and was clamped down and enforced by a male patriarchy. The pictures would make a difference. And then when they repeated, they voted in favor of legalising abortion and now in Portugal it is legal. Incredible. What do you think the legacy of your mother is? I think what we can learn from her is that we have to play to be free. You know, our world is becoming more and more tied down and prescriptive. But what made her succeed is the freedom of being able to play and do what she felt she needed to do instinctively. It is that coupled with not being ashamed or embarrassed to tell your own personal story which teaches us that that's what becomes universally connected, universally to everyone. I think she also, I hope, empowers women actually to do whatever their thing is, music, literature, painting. It's a world, all these worlds have been dominated almost exclusively by a male patriarchy for way too long. And the injustice of that is mind-boggling actually. I hope that if someone like her can do it in the belly of the beast when it was solely dominated by men and boy can women now thrive in a world which is much more open to having women do what they want to do. Yeah. And how has your view or your opinion changed as you've gotten older about her work? Well, it hasn't changed. I'm still completely in awe of it from the age of five until now. You know, I do help my mother a lot with her work. I help look after her museum in Portugal and her archive and her collection here and I help organize shows. I help with the tape. And this is made possible by the fact that I love the work. Can you imagine having to do this for your parents if you didn't? I also believe in her and I also am inspired by the fact that she is a woman who has succeeded in a man's world. Nick, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. We always ask our guests. Since you know your mother obviously very well and you've asked her everything that you would have liked to. Would there be anything that you would like to have said to her or asked her in a point in her life that you wouldn't have the opportunity? Oh yes. When I was a little boy, I got furious because my parents were never at home. They were in a different country. They were in London painting. I was brought up in Portugal by my grandpa as much as she was. And when they would come back to Portugal one time, I got across. I was five or six and I said to my father, "What's the big deal with an artist anyway?" I mean, think about it. I have friends at school who are doctors and lawyers and I get why they're important. But what's the point of an artist? My dad said as if he was reading from a definition in a dictionary, he said, "Oh, well, you see Nick, an artist is somebody who goes to places no one has ever been before and brings back a picture that nobody's ever seen, but everybody instantly recognizes. And that is important because it helps us understand ourselves." I went, "Wow." So the question I would ask my mother, I suppose, is I would ask her how much she valued in real life, how much she valued her family. Because it's all she paints really. She's always used us in her pictures. And, you know, if ever I got scared as a kid or had difficulty, she'd say to me, "Paint a picture of it. I want to see what it feels like. I want to see what it feels like." And I go, "Okay, I have to paint a picture to show my mum what it feels like." So when I was sent away to boarding school and I'd hated it, I didn't even know how to speak English then properly. And I was bullied. She'd say, "Oh, paint me. Oh, that's great. That's great." Pay me a picture of the bullies so that I can see what they're really like. So I would send her all these pictures of bullies and she kept them all, you know, it was like magic for her. She would feed off that. And so I would ask, you know, really, how important do you think your family was to you? Nick Welling, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. I had pleasure. Thank you all so much for listening to the 70th episode of The Great Woman Artist Podcast with The Brilliant. Nick Welling on his mother, The Great Puller Rago. It was so fascinating to hear about Rago's incredible life and to work and urge anyone in the UK to visit her fantastic take show, which is on until the 24th of October, 2021. This episode was found edited by The Brilliant Nadas Manage and research assistant was Viva Rooji. And if you have been enjoying his episode so far, I would be so grateful if you were to leave a review as it helps others find us. And of course, thank you so much for listening to The Great Woman Artist Podcast with me, Katie Hessel.