Paula Rego | Making the Real Thing

Experience the mesmerizing world of animation with our Director Lina Kalcheva‘s film based on the audio of renowned artist Paula Rego discussing her artistic process, this film is an exciting journey into the world of visualizing tension and agency.

Kalcheva was captivated by Rego’s description of working with human subjects and the challenge of “copying” them. The subject carries its own agency and can only be represented, never fully replicated. It’s only through the artist’s subjective lens that the subject is interpreted, making it a representation rather than the real thing.

To bring this tension to life, the film utilizes stop-motion digitally drawn animation with a large focus on experimenting with texture. The animated characters and shapes are textured digitally with scans of oil-painted canvas paper, giving them a distinct mark-making quality and a colour palette that emulates Rego’s early expressionist paintings.

But the technique doesn’t stop there! The background is a stop-motion animation made using oil on glass, further edited with colour correction to go through shades of the primary colours often found in Rego’s work. This technique creates a dynamic, colourful, and overwhelming nature that illustrates Rego’s notion of an overflowing personality and lends itself perfectly to animation.

Kalcheva’s adoption of some of Rego’s visual language was her way of interpreting the concepts underpinning Rego’s words by relating them to her body of work. The result is a mesmerizing journey that showcases the power of animation to bring ideas to life.