I assume that most, if not all, of my readers will have heard by now of the death of Paula Rego. I have been a great admirer of her work for many years, particularly as a pastellist. It was a wonderful privilege to be able to visit her major retrospective exhibition last year at the Tate Modern.
Paula Rego had the ability in her work to express very directly and openly her responses to experience. This was so much so that on occasions I found it to be almost embarrassing to find myself looking into her “inner space”. It was as if she had no sense at all of personal privacy. I find this state of mind very difficult to achieve. I experience a profound contradiction between the desire to build my art around personal insights and responses to experience, and the need to present these in a metaphorical and indirect manner. Life is encoded rather than revealed.
I suspect that this is an irremediable characteristic, and one with links me to my past as an academic. One of the strengths of my former work, I believe, was a capacity for objectivity. Indeed, I was praised during the Yugoslav wars for my independence of mind. I suppose that an appreciation of this lay behind my appointment as an advisor to the Select Committee of the House of Commons in their hearings on this subject, and also my recruitment as an advisor to the International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague. Probably it is the case that this capacity for detachment is not the most valuable personal attribute of an artist.