Paula Rego’s ‘Dancing Ostriches’

Paula Rego’s ‘Dancing Ostriches’ pastel drawings are on exhibition at The Marlborough Art Gallery, London until 12 November 2016.

If you have a chance to get down during the next week or so these are a wonderful set of drawings.

Pastels are dry pigments, it is as if you are drawing with coloured earth when you use them. You also use your fingers a lot when working in pastel, that trademark smudge of finger softness, being often resharpened by a mark pushed straight back into the softness. Its a medium you have to keep working with to ensure it doesn't just dissolve into a cloud of unknowing. This oscillation between smudging and re-finding an edge begins to build a dense surface, one that can in Rego's case carry the compact density and visual weight of her figures. Her 'ostriches' are very much women, but nevertheless birds too. They remind us of our animal being, of a not very far away raw nature, one that we ought to be celebrating rather than decimating. The more we are reminded of our close relationship to other creatures perhaps the more empathy we might develop towards those creatures that are not us. The act of taking a complex of coloured minerals and moving them around on a paper surface until they remind us of another connection we may well be forgetting, is an old act, one that a shaman would have been central to in times gone by. The giving of agency to other things is a powerful idea, one that involves a complex metamorphosis from one thing to another and which often also involves hybrids. Things not quite one thing or another. These ostrich women are in these terms other worldly, the operate in that gap between humans and animals, hybrid forms that have a weight and gravity that convinces us that they matter, that their physicality is very important and that the dance is always more powerful than it seems. 

Find a review of the exhibition here

See also:

Why draw animals