Artist Rose Wylie was born in 1934 in Kent. Not finding fame until her mid-70s, she has since exhibited at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC and at Tate Britain. As a young woman, she was painted by Anthony Devas for the Aero Girl ad campaign. Her current work juxtaposes bright, abstract paintings with plain, unprimed canvases. In 2014 she won the John Moores Painting prize and in 2015 the Charles Wollaston award for “most distinguished work” in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. She is the subject of Imagine, which airs on BBC One tonight.
1. Book
Dark Ecology, Timothy Morton (2016)
A little while ago I decided to give up reading, so I’d have much more time for painting and drawing. But I’ve been told I must read this book, and I think it’s very important. It argues that the current dualism between man and nature is a mistake; that separation shouldn’t exist, but we’ve pushed it in terms of agriculture, industrial food production and so on. On a smaller scale, I’m interested because I have a garden which I do not try to control; it takes its own shape. A lot of people see it as neglect, but I don’t, and it’s interesting to substantiate what I’m doing with more general movements as expressed in books like this.
2. Talk
Frida Escobedo, Serpentine Gallery
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Frida Escobedo at her courtyard pavilion. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
I went to this very good live panel discussion last month. Escobedo, who has done this year’s pavilion at the Serpentine, was in conversation with one of her tutors [architect Mohsen Mostafavi], the woman who’d written the text for her catalogue [Marina Otero Verzier] and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. They talked about building in a sense which embraced nature: her pavilion has opacity and transparency, depending on where you stand, so the outside comes in sometimes but not all the time. This led to her ideas about duration and modality. I actually found the pavilion more interesting after the talk. And Escobedo reminded me of Frida Kahlo, because she is Mexican and her name was Frida and she had a quite lively, very definite face. I liked her a lot.
3. Film
A Fantastic Woman (Dir: Sebastián Lelio, 2017)
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Transgender actor Daniela Vega plays a transgender woman struggling with life in Santiago. Photograph: Allstar/Sony Pictures Classics
I thought it was interesting that it was actually a transgender actress, Daniela Vega, taking the part of a transgender woman in this film. It’s about the difficulty she has, as a transgender person, with the society around her in Santiago, Chile. Vega was brilliant, and as a painter I appreciated that she has a marvellous face. Someone in the film referred to her legs as footballer legs, but in fact she had wonderful legs and she wore the most terrific little ankle boots, which cut her legs off visually in a very good proportion, rather like Pina Bausch would have done. The very notion of somebody acting according to what they felt was their identity, and finding opposition from society, is a very contemporary theme.
4. Architecture
The Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nuns visit the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba. Photograph: Gerard Julien/AFP/Getty Images
I can’t stop using the Mosque of Córdoba as an example of glorious, defiant excess. I haven’t actually been there, but my son went to Córdoba recently and showed me photographs of the mosque, which dates back to the tenth century and was later converted to a Roman Catholic church. I was exhilarated to see these rows and rows of pillars and striped arches running down visually on top of each other. It’s so wondrously excessive, and the colours – flowerpot-orange on stone putty – completely fit. I used a similar colour in a painting I did called Tube Girls, based on a photograph by Malick Sidibé.
5. Exhibition
Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy, at Tate Modern
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pablo Picasso: The Dream (1932). Photograph: Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2018
I haven’t seen the Frida Kahlo show at the V&A yet, so I’m going with Picasso at Tate Modern. It was a great idea to narrow it down to one year’s painting, and I liked the difference between the beginning of the show – which was darker and more serious – and the marvellous relief as you go through. There were a few paintings I hadn’t seen before, and I found them very good. One that stood out was of Dora Maar, with a very white and completely round face turned up. It reminded me of a painting I’d just done of a completely round face on a plain canvas. When I saw the Picasso, I got a sort of shimmer from it, a sense of shared invention.
6. Restaurant
The Sportsman, Seasalter, Kent
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Sportsman in Kent. Photograph: Alamy
I rarely go to restaurants – I’m a poor artist – but the chef-owner of the Sportsman, Stephen Harris, is a friend of my children, so I do occasionally go there. I like the building, the fact that it doesn’t look tarted up – it’s the right colour for the edge of the sea. There are nice planks on the floor… I like planks. He makes his own butter and salt, which doesn’t actually matter too much to me, but I think it matters to other people. He once sent me this delicious steak and kidney pie with an oyster in the middle – that was a nice touch. I very much like his attitude.
Rose Wylie, the most important British artist you’ve probably never heard of, talks painting and how it's never too late
In a bedroom studio at her tumbledown cottage in Kent, Rose Wylie is correcting me. “No, it’s not a swan,” she says, as we stand in front of one of her bold and utterly distinctive paintings. “It’s a white heron.”
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The heron I mistook for a swan is being carried on the back of a purple horse, through a flat plane slashed with black vertical lines, and the 83-year-old painter has labelled each figure in black capital letters.
The painting, like much of her work, is both contemporary and strangely archaic. Herons, Wylie tells me, were once revered as representatives of truth (“the long beak could needle out the real story”), and she equates her work with the images that in antiquity were “painted on cave and temple walls”. Yet look at the animals, shock-haired women and movie stars that populate her playful canvases and it’s clear that the present generation of artists owes something to Wylie’s influence – not least the potter and tapestry-maker Grayson Perry. “Well, he’s never said that to me,” she says.
That influence is only going to get stronger, as Wylie is now getting her own Imagine… special. “When I got the call, I thought, ‘Crikey, what’s going on here?’ In my mind, Imagine… is for big names – for Bob Dylan and Philip Roth.”
There are other accolades: to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Royal Academy, Wylie, like Perry, has a whole London street decorated with banners bearing her work. “He’s got Piccadilly, I’ve got Bond Street,” she says. And she has just been made an OBE.
A few days before we meet she was presented with the South Bank Sky Arts Award for the Visual Arts by Germaine Greer, the woman who first brought Wylie to public attention with a laudatory piece in The Guardian in 2010. Before that, Wylie was unknown and, for 20 years, she didn’t paint at all.
Wylie went to art school in the 1950s, before marrying the painter Roy Oxlade (who died in 2014) and bringing up their three children while supporting Oxlade’s career. Then, in the late 1970s, she says, “Suddenly, I began to paint.” Free, for two decades, from any personal concern about making an artwork fashionable or successful, she “painted without any consideration of what is wanted or what is bought. I was simply painting for me.”
Age has had little effect on Wylie’s output, but she did have to change technique 18 years ago. “I used to paint on the floor, then I changed to the wall after I fell down the stairs at a friend’s house – I had two hip replacements. That’s why my earlier work, done on the floor, has puddles, and my later work, done on the wall, has drips.”
Wylie is not an abstract artist; she observes the real world and reports back with the directness of her own vision. One of her works shows the rooster symbol of Tottenham Hotspur facing off with the cannon of Arsenal. She says she isn’t annoyed when her work is criticised as childlike – it’s merely a misunderstanding of what art is. “Some people think painting is about stark reality. In fact, it’s about poetry and transformation.”
If Rose Wylie’s late career blossoming tells us anything, it’s this – no matter how late you think it might be, it’s never too late. “Make the best of what you’ve got,” she says. “Wear what you want, paint what you want and do what you want.”
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Imagine… airs on BBC1 at 10.30pm on Sunday 22nd July
Review
by David Butcher
Acclaim came late for painter Rose Wylie. If that means you don’t recognise the name or know her spontaneous, loosely strung work, this is the perfect primer. At the age of 83, Wylie is, says Alan Yentob “at the peak of her powers”, with “a way of seeing that is entirely her own”.
He visits the fabulously cluttered house in Kent where she has lived for 50 years, and where every wall and surface supports a doodle, a section of painting or an encrusted brush.
If you find Wylie’s visual style rudimentary — all bandy-limbed figures and big black writing — stick with it and by the end, what Germaine Greer calls her “silliness” and magpie spirit might win you over.
