Paula Rego paints a world of dark fairy tale where childhood stories are thin guises for psycho-sexual intrigue and taboo, where magical realism rules, where nothing is certain except the witchy powers of feminism, and the underlying notion that nothing is as it seems.Paula Rego recalls that after the Second World War, German refugees turned up in Estoril in Portugal looking for work. Olga was taken on by a Portugese family to teach her native language to their daughter. They suspected that she had something to hide, but her secret was safe with them.



Drawing from her own childhood memories, Paula Rego's work illustrates corrupted folklore, where fairytale and horror converge to portray feminine experience. Recalling childhood visits to the movies with her father, Rego's Snow White series appropriates the Disney story with unnerving fictional and autobiographical twists. In Snow White Playing With Her Father's Trophies, Rego uses the allegory of female vanity to underlie a familial politic. The heroine, pictured in a white dress symbolising virginity and innocence, seems wryly aware of her own sexuality. Sat unladylike with legs spread, she prizes the head of a young buck between her knees, representing sexual awakening and insinuating improper affection towards her father. In the background, her stepmother kneels as aging witch, looking on with scorn and envy.For Rego the figures are grotesque, a word she is careful to distinguish from caricature. Caricature is mockery; grotesque, derived from grotto, describes the dark, secret, vulnerable side of human character. Like a middle-aged aerobics class the ostrich women strive heroically against increasing odds. 'They are old fighters', which is why one falls not like the dying swan in the ballet but the sculpture of the Gallic warrior in Rome: and why others from the heraldic prow of a ship, battling through the waves.

Rego purposely did not look at the film but relied on her memory and an occasional glance at John Cluhane's illustrated history of Fantasia. In the film the ostriches perform the waking or 'Morning' sequence from Dance of the Hours, a ballet in the opera La Gioconda (The Smiling One) by Amilcare Ponchielli, first performed in 1876. Cluhane writes that in the first stages the animators made sketches of ballet dancers who were brought to the studio to perform positions and movements, "the equivalent of a model's holding poses for an artist who draws still pictures". The models were turned into birds, sometimes quite literally. As those present recalled there was "a very tall, very ostrichlike girl, and she loved doing the burlesque of the ostrich for us.We put a few feathers on her costume where ostrich feathers should appear, and a bow on her head, and she performed the routine to perfection." Rego reserves this process, turning the birds back into people.

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