Nick Willing

And off she'd go, creating these incredibly imaginative stories for a very young Paula, who then grew up absolutely addicted to stories and storytelling.

And when she went to the Slade at a very young age, she came to London when she was 16.

She went to the Slade when she was 17, in 1952.

And she continued to do storytelling or narrative pictures, which was very unfashionable at the time.

And she was scolded for it by her professors.

That was not what you should do.

They were obsessed with Houston Road painting in those days.

Right.

If you know what that is, you have to measure everything.

Eugenio is a great exponent, friend of Paulus.

Yeah.

Lovely man.

She was more interested in how pictures could tell stories.

So she was very much against the grain in that sense.

But one of the things I think that marks her storytelling apart from other narrative paintings,

is that although she starts with a classic story, Jane Eyre, for instance, or a Dickensian story or a Portuguese story like

As she's making the pictures, the story starts to change and she lets it go.

She lets it change and she follows wherever it takes her.

And as she's making it, she starts to realize that the reason it's changing

is because it's becoming about her and her life and perhaps a memory or a trauma from her childhood that hasn't been properly processed and needs to be re-evaluated and looked at again and painted and painted and painted.