The artist Paula Rego was in her eighties when her son, the writer and director Nick Willing, realised that she was beginning to tell him stories that he had never heard before. “In the past she had always been rather secret,” he says. Perhaps because secrets have an implicit power. “As soon as they are out, you have dissipated their life force.” His mother needed to keep all this force for her paintings — she wouldn’t fritter it away in talk — and the “secret” stories she had begun to tell cast a revelatory light on her life’s work. “My mother used to deny that the fables and fairytales, all the novels and nursery rhymes that [she] addressed in her paintings had anything directly to…

Source: The Times March 10, 2017 17:03 UTC