Rose Wylie likes things that fly – butterflies, dragonflies, angels, planes – but also triangles, crossings-out, Babar, and hazel leaves. Looking around the Royal Academy, on whose esteemed walls Wylie is now making long-overdue history as the first female painter to take over the main galleries, you realise that this list barely scratches the surface. At 91, Rose Wylie is as freshly delighted by the things she sees as, well, a child.
Despite her advanced years, Wylie’s paintings might pass for the work of someone very young – the bright colours, simple shapes, spelling mistakes and flattened space combine with a magpie-ish interest in all the incident and detail of daily life.
The comically plump silhouette of a cat, the flowers coming up in the garden, pictures of film stars on the red carpet, and footballers on the pitch, remembered from the TV, or saved as newspaper cuttings – these are just some of Wylie’s subjects.
They are not the consequential areas of endeavour typically favoured by “serious” painters of grand dramas, portraits and landscapes – the sort she envisages in Sardonic Artist (1991). In fact they’re quite the opposite, their apparently carefree ways a thin disguise for her dogged commitment to interrogating and dispensing with the conventions of painting, inculcated during her years at Folkestone and Dover School of Art, which she attended from the age of 18.
Some of Rose Wylie’s work, such as ‘Kill Bill’ (2007), refers to films. Her favourite director is Quentin Tarantino (Photo: Soon-Hak Kwon /Jari Lager)
“Do the thing you’re told not to,” she tells Frances Morris, former director of Tate Modern, in an interview in the accompanying book. It doesn’t matter that she’s referring to her love of red lipstick – a small rebellion against her parents – because it holds true for her art, which kicks against just about every rule ever laid down. Instead, Wylie draws us into her complete and entirely absorbing worldview, in which fragmented childhood memories, and episodes of ancient history, mingle freely with the incidents of day-to-day.
There’s The Well-Cooked Omelette, from 1989, one of the earliest works here, a monumental painting of a perfectly fluffy omelette sitting on a blue and white plate. But an omelette won’t wait for anyone, and certainly not for the time it takes to paint its portrait. You start to worry about this omelette, so well-cooked, but destined, surely, for the bin.
With a few exceptions, the 90 works in this retrospective date from the past 25 years or so, and a look at Wylie’s significant exhibitions, including at Tate Britain in 2013, and the Serpentine Gallery in 2017, suggests an artist more up and coming than in her dotage.
Wylie was 76 when Germaine Greer described her as Britain’s “hottest new artist”, the only British inclusion in Women to Watch, a 2010 exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC. Recognition followed, and in 2014, she was elected a Royal Academician, and awarded an OBE in 2018.
‘Yellow Strip’ (2006) was inspired by watching the movements of footballers on ‘Match of the Day’ (Photo: Jack Hems)
Late recognition was a consequence of a hiatus of some years, following her marriage to the painter Roy Oxlade in 1957, whom she had met while they were both training to be teachers at Goldsmith’s College. Three children followed, and in the usual way, Wylie dedicated herself to their upbringing, interspersed with some teaching, with Oxlade the principal breadwinner. This is not a matter of resentment, she said in 2018, “because the children are good, okay, great, knockout!… maybe you come back to it again with a bit more excitement, perhaps, than if you’d kept going all that time.”
As she points out, the time spent bringing up a family is not lost time, but a time of accumulating experiences, during which she read a great deal, and saw exhibitions, and taught. “I was meeting artists, going to shows, looking at images in books, buying art-history books for college, sorting through all these new books on artists. I was absolutely in it; I just wasn’t doing it.”
Once the children left home, she turned a room into a studio and in 1979 she and her husband enrolled as postgraduate students at the Royal College of Art. Here she focused on drawing, and specifically on methods of teaching drawing in British art schools.
Drawing has continued to underpin everything she does, because, she tells Morris, after having seen something, “I want to keep it. Have it. Own it.” A room of the exhibition is dedicated to her drawings, an expansive activity that ranges from what are effectively diary notes – a rat caught by her cat, Pete, for example – to preparatory drawings for paintings, such as her self-portrait Fluffy Head (2020).
‘Park Dogs & Air Raid (2017) recalls Wylie’s childhood memories of the Blitz (Photo: David Parry /Royal Academy of Arts)
Even the most fleetingly gestural of sketches can be misleading though – A Bee (2000-02) has all the immediacy you expect from an insect that will buzz off any second, and yet it was made in ink and collage over a period of two years.
Time is fickle in Wylie’s work, just as it is in our memories, which merge with dreams and the stories told by others to form impressions that stick fast over years and decades, just as others fragment and dwindle to nothing.
So it is that in Park Dogs & Air Raid (2017), in which she recalls childhood memories of the Blitz, the fury of an air raid over Bayswater coincides with the leisurely ramblings of dogs and ducks in the park below.
Nicole Kidman has featured repeatedly in works by Wylie, including in ‘Black Strap (Red Fly)’ (2012) (Photo: Soon-Hak Kwo / Jari Lager)
The orderly translation of observed reality to a three-dimensional surface does not interest Wylie. For a start, she likes mistakes for their capacity to show process, thinking, and the development of an idea. And then there’s the “poetic transformation” that is a key part of her project, to dispense with conventions of seeing and representing, and instead to convey a more direct, original vision. “Like poetry”, she says, “it becomes a new description of something that you know about.”
This is one reason for Wylie’s preference for working from the familiar – footballers like Wayne Rooney, or a film star like Nicole Kidman, both of whom feature in the exhibition. In a million years you’d never recognise Kidman, her neck as thick as a navvy’s, and yet in her reduction to a column of pink and red, the dress with its distinctive strap, and a blob of yellow hair, there is truth, about the way we remember famous people as they are caught on camera, the image reproduced over and over again.
Despite the variety of her work, which ranges from paintings of scenes from films – Quentin Tarantino is a favourite director – to her Room Project (2003-04), an immersive world of cats and cut-out fairy dolls made for the Trinity Theatre, Tunbridge Wells, Wylie’s style is oddly unchanging.
And yet perhaps it’s the possibility of still more radical discoveries even now, at 91, that keeps her eye, and hand, so fresh.
‘Rose Wylie: The Picture Comes First’ is at the Royal Academy, London, until 19 April
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