Nick Willing

You see, those are your secrets that you're drawing, but you're also there, your anxieties, your fears, your neuroses.

They're all the things, your shadow, as Jung would call it, you draw.

Now, in Paula's pictures, that develops in a very sophisticated way.

It's always instinctual.

It's not something that she's intellectually driven to explore.

It's something that she just feels she has to do, you see.

So she starts drawing a picture of God knows what.

And then she realizes that the reason she's interested in that story is because it's reminding her of a terrible feeling she hasn't really come to terms with yet.

And that's the secret.

So she starts to draw that as well.

And the picture and the story changes in order to accommodate the secret.

So Paula Reger pictures are always filled with lots of different, sometimes conflicting emotions, just like life.

And they're a mixture of a story that you can understand, Hans Christian Andersen, for instance, and a story that is her personal secret.

You know, it's a story by Hans Christian Andersen.

She's making this drawing in 1969.

And it's a story about Hans Christian Andersen about a princess that gets expelled by her father, the king, and then rejected by her suitor, the prince, because she is too interested in material things.

She falls for a trick where her prince makes her a teapot that when the steam rises, it plays her favorite tune.

And she says, oh, what do you want for this?

And he says, a kiss.

So because she kisses him for the teapot, she's expelled.