Although Paula had a desire to please she did have her own occasional outbursts of misbehavior. When she was five she took her latest doll which was made of fleshy rubber and was just like a real baby and one by one snipped off each of it's little fingers. To this day she is not exactly sure why she did it, although she thinks it may have been because the doll was a boy and she had initially dissapointed when she was born because he had wanted a son. For whatever reason she did it she says that that same spirit of revolt that had thrilled her then has remained in her. She artistically realized this in the 1960's when she began to cut up her drawings and rearrange them as collages. The doll along with most of Paula's toys was a gift from her garndparents. When ever they visited her, they always made sure to bring plenty of presents to suprise her with. On one occasion her grandfather brought her a box of swimsuits, one for each day of the week, her favorite out of all these was one with a butterfly motif and it eventually made it's way into her art in the form of a costume worn by one of the vivian girls. Her greatest treat though were the days when they packed a picnic tea which included her favorite Berlin Balls which were a sort of super doughnut and went to the Cinema. It was on one of these trips that Paula saw her first Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. She describes the experience as "the discovery of a new world." The part where the branches of the trees turn into grabbing hands particularly terrified her and it is from that moment she dates her agoraphobia.

Her love of films continues to now, she still says it's her favorite form of entertainment. This love of film was shared by her father who would make his own little films for the amusement of himself and his friends and show them in Paula's grandparent's basement. This was the first private cinema in the country and it was there that Paula saw all the Charlie Chaplin and Disney films. Books also had an impact on her, although one she denied that she ever read or was read to as a child she has since taken that back. One book that was particularly influential was Contesses' Les Malheurs de Sophie and Les Petites Filles Modeles in which the prim and proper heroines are less docile than they pretend to be. Also she agreed with Gabriel Garcia Marquez on that "everyone has a public world, a private world, and a secret world." Her ability to use her imagination and talent to express these innermost worlds was exhilerating. Although Paula's art is drawn from her won personal experiences she keeps it removed from her own life by using various methods. Sometimes through abstraction like in these collages, anthromorphism, and in her recent paintings by setting her pictures in the past. Her son Nicholas says on this "Her art is principally to do with experiences of her childhood. I think that's where she's drawing most of her sources, because her emotions were more polarised then. And so the faces and figures and clothes are those of her childhood. In the picture Joseph's Dream she told them she need something in the foreground. I suggested an old vacuum cleaner, which she thought was a very good idea. So she painted in a vacuum cleaner, but immediately she had to paint it out because she said it made the picture look kitsch. And that's the problem with putting in modern things, because her world is so timeless-well not timeless, but the world of her past, of her childhood, is lost in time."