Make believe

"Painting is practical but it's magical as well. Being in my studio is like being inside my own theatre." Paula Rego.

One of the things I did before I got too ill to write about it was visit the Paula Rego exhibition at Tate Britain last month. Since I was a girl, Rego's paintings have mesmerised me with their dark, claustrophobic, voyeuristic, erotic and fairytale narratives. Each of her paintings inspire tales to be spun around them, and I used to write stories by doing just that.

Rego's father owned the first private cinema in Portugal, and all her works have a richly-coloured, filmic quality about them. Abortions, village dances, nursery rhymes, incest, police interrogations - very little escapes her subversive eye.

The visual equivalent of that other passionate fabulist, Angela Carter, she is also that rare breed of modern artist: a figurative painter.

"Pictures have always been about stories, like Christian mythology." Paula Rego.

Related link:
+ Guardian profile of Paula Rego

Other links today:
+ The Firefox browser began as an experimental side-project of a 17 year old.
+ How to speed up Firefox
+ How to fix mom's computer and rid it of malware, spyware, trojans et al.
+ Will the real Dr Atkins please stand up?
+ Are the Knights Templars alive and well and living in Hertford?

+ Edge asks scientists "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?"

• Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, for example, replies: "I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all 'design' anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection."
• Physicist Kenneth Ford: "I believe that microbial life exists elsewhere in our galaxy."
• Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux: "I believe that animals have feelings and other states of consciousness, but neither I nor anyone else has been able to prove it."
• Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman: "I believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists. Space-time, matter and fields never were the fundamental denizens of the universe but have always been, from their beginning, among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being."
• Psychologist David Buss: "True love."