We visited Lakeside Gallery to see Paula Rego and Grayson Perry's exhibitions, where each artist was given a room to set up their works. Both artists used different yet similar mediums, such as lithographs, printmaking, and carvings. With a variety of sizes both artists used, all sorts of details can be seen in all of their works, from small words only visible up close to quick and simple shapes that still show art pieces.
Rego was born and raised in Portugal during the Salazar dictatorship to Anglophile parents. These parents instilled in Rego a love for books and stories of all kinds and encouraged her to read and speak English. Rego was a voracious reader, and her early years were surrounded by great literature books whose vivid and graphic ideas made an indelible impression on her imagination.
Paula Rego: Visions of English Literature aims to spark new ways of seeing the world through these seemingly familiar, age-old stories.
In 1989, Rego made a book of Nursery Rhymes for her first granddaughter, Carmen, who was two years old. Her delight in turning the songs into pictures spurred her to make the long series of etchings.
She used these well-known figures from the nursery rhymes with her own twist to tell stories that combine fantasy and imagination, innocence and cruelty, to explore the complexities of life and the experience of women in particular, in all its strangeness and mystery. In her art, these stories can be told with just one glance.
(Baa, Baa Black Sheep, 1989, Etching and aquatint)
(Old Mother Goose, 1989, Hand coloured etching and aquatint)
