Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1997, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a painter. At the age of 62 she finds herself popular and admired,

but it's been a long hard slog from her conservative Portuguese childhood to the top of the British scene. At 17 she entered the Slade School of

of Art in London and won the Principal's Prize in the summer of 54, but it wasn't until she

was in her mid-40s that she enjoyed her first solo show in London.

She is a figurative painter whose pictures often depict disquieting scenes from her domestic life.

She's also well known for her work based on fairy tales, animals with human

qualities, creatures in whom she can invest nameless passions and sinister thoughts.

Much of this is a revolt against her childhood where to answer back invoked retribution.

Hence, she says, the flight into storytelling.

She is Paula Rago.

And are the stories you tell, Paula, are they about you, about what you're thinking and feeling?

Is that what we can read if we knew how to read it in these paintings?

I prefer not to have stories about me. They're usually

something that happens outside myself. Sometimes there's stories about people I

know. Their experiences or the people you've met or experiences you've had.

They are people whom I know quite intimately

and I turn them into characters and make stories up about them very often.

Because you said before now that your husband who died in 1988, didn't he?

But he used to be able to look at your paintings and he knew where you'd been and who you'd met or what kind of person you had met.

I knew where I'd been whom I'd met and what I'd been up to even.

...