ARTISTS TALKING

The success of Paula Rego's figurative work is something of an anomaly, seeming astoundingly untouched by the endless critical wrangling that surrounds figurative painting. In the 80s, as Rego gained increasing international acclaim, it was installation, ready-made (as well as un-made) and conceptual artworks that dominated the artistic scene, with painting increasingly labelled as a self-indulgent or outmoded way of working. Intrigued by her somewhat improbable success in this context, I met the artist at the opening of her current exhibition at Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal to discover how she reached the heady heights of celebrity.

Her success she says has not been pre-planned or orchestrated to any great degree but has been more "a matter of luck really, luck and good helpers". Luck, friends and perhaps a little magic that is: "Somehow you need people to believe in you – like Peter Pan!...You've got to have at least one person who believes in you because art can be so solitary." Rego's fairytale support came in the guise of her husband, artist and critic Victor Willing. Somehow managing to juggle her multiple roles as artist, wife and mother of three children, finding the finances to support her work was not always easy for Rego. "Financially I was helped by my father for many years and then Vic my husband taught, lectured and I also did a bit of teaching but it was very hard going at one time' I was helped on my way enormously by the Gulbenkian Foundation who have supported me since the early 60s." The Gulbenkian's support came in the form of a two-year scholarship that led to her inclusion in a group show, exhibiting alongside Hockney and Auerbach. Her first real break though she recalls, came in 1981 in her first solo show in London at the Air Gallery: "The gallery was associated to Space who rented studios to artists; I was working in one of the spaces and was given a show, it was brilliant, after that things just took off... it was unbelievable."

In practical career matters, Rego seems to shy from the hard-edged business realm and the notorious world of networking, preferring the imaginative solace of her London studio and loving the anonymity the capital city affords her. "A studio can compensate for a lot of things in life... in some ways, my life is more real in the studio than in other places."

Her acclaim has been augmented by a sharp political and social focus in her works that gives them a contemporary relevance and critical importance beyond their easy narrative and fairytale appeal. Nowhere is this more visible than in her recent abortion series depicting women in various uncomfortable stages of termination, (1997-1999). The defiant stare of these self-determining women symbolises Rego's response to a fated referendum in Portugal to legalise abortion: "This series was my way of trying to ask, maybe they'll have another referendum and they will change the law to make it acceptable for anybody to go along and have a termination should they want to do so."

Her concern for women's rights is evident throughout her work, where women are invariably depicted as strong, independent women; the male characters are customarily assigned the role of victim or side-lined to a passive periphery. Rego seems to have an intuitive knack of hitting society's political jugular with impeccable timing. Her inversion of the passive female stereotype coincided perfectly with the zenith of feminist re-evaluations just as the implicit violence underpinning her domestic scenes gained critical attention at a time of widespread concern with family discord and social responsibility – heightened by the horror of the James Bulger case. This correspondence seems to filter into her work by means of a subconscious process rather than by design. Paula emphasises that her images and stories are initially drawn from her imagination, somehow creating themselves and suggesting new possibilities to her: "The first images come from my head, from imagination... so often, drawing tells you something that you weren't aware of in your conscious life."

Paula Rego, like the characters she invents comes across as a determined and independent woman who has refused to compromise her practice for anybody – least of all in the name of critical approval. "If it is true that my works are popular, then it is because they say something to people, to women mostly I think, but this is an unconscious thing, you can't do what other people want can you? You just have to do what you want."