Paula Rego began painting as a young girl at home in Lisbon. She came to school in England in her teens and went on to study art at the Slade School in London. But much of her work refers to her childhood memories from Lisbon and her Portuguese roots.

Rego has consistantly used paint and printmaking techniques, as well as collage, but drawing has always been the foundation of her practice. Her drawings are where she plays, sketching freely and swiftly, testing out ideas or visualising thoughts as they come to her. In her childhood, drawing was an escape route into her imagination and later, as an adult artist she has used what she calls 'imaginative scribbles' to get herself started when she becomes creatively stuck. Recalling drawing as a child she said. "I used to do a lot of drawings. I used to sit on the floor and make this 'aaaaaaa' noise. I still do it now and I still sit on the floor to draw and paint. " Paula Rego

For the painting 'The Dance' (right) Rego made eleven preliminary drawings and sketches, each one playing with different movement, expressions, moods and composition.

Paula Rego, 'The Dance', 1988 (2)

Paula Rego, 'Hey Diddle Diddle', 1989 (3)

"An only child, as Rego was, lives very much inside their own head, and invents their own family of characters and things." Judith Collins

Childhood memories and observations have been extremely important to Rego. So has her own imagination. Her work often has an almost dreamlike quality to it, whether it conjours up the chaotic images of our sleep or the fantasies of our daydreams. With their imaginative and often subversive content, those images set in claustrophobic interior spaces often with harsh shadows, are a reminder of the work of a number of Surrealist artists including Giorgio de Chirico and Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst. Like the Surrealists, Rego exposes many of our unconcious thoughts as well as some of the more uncomfortable human impulses, like cruelty or humiliation.

The relationships between the characters in her pictures depict the power games we play with each other, as children and adults - games which end in tears as often as laughter.They show people's frailty and vulnerability as well as their capacity for joy or pleasure, their cruelty as well as their affection.

Besides taking ideas from her own memories or straight from her imagination, Rego has made a number of pieces based on traditional stories or characters. She has made a series of etchings of nursery rhymes (see left) which re-interpret many of these in bizarre or even disturbing ways, reminding us of the fearful nature of some of those childhood stories. In a series of paintings and large pastel drawings, she has also been inspired by sources from Disney's animation Fantasia, opera such as Bizet's Carmen and the fairy tale Snow White.

While she does include men and boys in her paintings, the majority of her characters are women and girls. They always appear to be dressed up, wearing costumes rather than ordinary clothes. Their pretty formal dresses suggest the strict moral and social codes which control them and but cannot disguise their secret or forbidden desires to break out.

IT'S ONLY MAKE BELIEVE...

• What would you do or make, inspired by this artist's work?

• As Rego's work suggests, play is not always kind. It can be cruel too. Sometimes what starts out as a game turns into bullying. How could you use art, language or perfomance to help people understand or overcome bullying?

• Many critics as well as Rego herself have referred to the theatrical nature of her paintings, as if her subjects were characters in a play, acting out scenes in the spaces she paints for them. Is there a particular moment that stands out in your memory (from your life, or from a favourite book, film or TV programme)? Could you recreate it as a scene in a drawing or painting. What if you described the scene, just using speech and a few props...

Paula Rego, 'The Family', 1988 (4)