Rose Wylie
When we spoke, Rose Wylie had just celebrated her 90th birthday. She had also just appeared in the recently-launched Loewe campaign, photographed in her studio in Kent. Needless to say, she is booked and busy.
Image credit: Rose Wylie, Singing Life Model, 2017, oil on canvas, 169 × 182 cm. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner © Rose Wylie
“I don’t have a theme. Something arrives from somewhere … I see it. If it’s really, really visually exciting, well, I get excited.” That’s how Rose Wylie describes the conception of her paintings: organic, disparate, responsive. “It can be a bird outside the window or somebody’s hat.
The way somebody’s mouth slips when they smile. Smiles are interesting, and teeth.”
Wylie, 90 years old and living and working in the same charming house in Kent – the Garden of England – that she has for over half a century, paints on unprimed, unstretched canvases. An avid consumer of media, any media, what she sees around her is what she grants immortality on those raw, charismatic canvases. She was a prolific reader of the classics – Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Proust, Coleridge (the title of her last solo show with David Zwirner references On Poesy
or Art, from 1818) – in her years off painting while raising the children she shares with her (then) more prominent painter husband Roy Oxlade. She admits that she still watches a lot of films. She loves art and ancient history. She paints
by observing her surroundings. Everything makes it in – high and low, near and far, often all at once.
She calls her approach trans-temporality. “I like antiquity that looks like now,” says Wylie. It is not trans-historical because it is more a melting together of time, we agree, and it is not atemporal either, because it feels more akin to travelling across than sitting outside of. Plus, it’s got good rhythm... Subscribe to read all articles in full
