ROSE WYLIE
From Snow White to the Queen of Sheba, an array of colourful characters populate the painter’s playful yet political canvases
Rose Wylie is worrying that she hasn’t given Serena Williams enough space. Considering that the artist’s depiction of the tennis star already spans the full width of her Kent cottage’s master bedroom, which she has used as her studio for the past few decades, this doesn’t strike me as an obvious cause for concern. ‘But Serena is a magnificent woman – a queen,’ Wylie says, casting a critical eye over the wall to which the canvas is staple-gunned. ‘The size was, possibly still is, a bit mean. And she’s not a mean personality. She’s powerful, and expansive as an idea.’
This is a typical Wylie work in progress – if there is such a thing. Billed as ‘Britain’s hottest new artist’ by Germaine Greer in 2010, the painter, and her outsize pictures, finally caught the country’s full attention following the Serpentine’s major solo show of her work in late 2017, when she was 83. In her twenties, Wylie studied at Dover School of Art and then Goldsmiths, where she met her husband, the artist and teacher Roy Oxlade. The couple relocated to Canada, then Wales, before moving in 1968 to the house we are currently standing in. Wylie picked her brushes back up in the late Seventies, after a spell of concentrating on family life: bringing up the children and supporting Oxlade (who died in 2014). Much has been made of her ‘fallow’ years, but today she gives a gesture of tossing that idea out of the window. ‘I might not have been painting, but I was putting together stews, making clothes… I’ve always been hands-on,’ she says. ‘I pick up the fish and fillet it.’
Wylie grasps and dissects ideas and inspirations just as unflinchingly in her pictures. Draughtsmen from El Greco to Walt Disney inspire her joyously unruly renderings of subjects, including athletes, Hollywood pin-ups, saints, Mexican barbers, the Queen of Sheba, Cuban dancers, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth I and her pet cat, Pete. Her stylistic influences are equally diverse, encompassing Pompeii’s ancient murals, Egyptian Hajj paintings, Matisse still-lifes and Manga strips. The latter prompts an excellent conversation on the media narrative around her work. ‘Your lot say it is “cartoony” or “childlike”. And it makes me furious. I’m obviously not a child and obviously I know what I’m doing – I can choose,’ she says. ‘Cartoons are direct, in the same way that a child’s work is, and I like direct expression. I don’t like arty-farty.’
Instead, Wylie fearlessly tackles the thorniest topics head-on, committing her thoughts and questions about politics, religion, fame, love, history, money and nature to canvas. Skewed depictions of Snow White grapple with modern feminism, a domestic gas hob deformed into a swastika explores Nazism, and the locomotive legend the Fat Controller parodies governmental attempts to manage child obesity. In her monumental portrayal of Serena Williams’ torso, the athlete’s muscular majesty – conjured up with Wylie’s signature broad brushstrokes – is painted in burgundy, outlined in yellow. ‘Not black, because that would be too close and banal,’ she says. ‘Red takes us outside the problem of race and makes it a picture of everyone.’ Evoking the tension between elite sport and motherhood with which Williams has publicly struggled, here the champion player has splashes of milk spraying energetically from her nipples. The image is shocking yet tender: even unfinished, it is a terrific example of the way Wylie’s sincerity, irreverence and wit can co-exist in person and in paint. Words – both profound and piquant – play an important part in her work, and she is a great reader: Chekhov, Baudelaire, Rilke, Proust and ‘the magical-realist people’ are long-term favourites. She also often finds fresh subjects in glossy magazines and newspapers.
Like her literature of choice, Wylie’s outlook is both refreshingly old-fashioned and progressively modern. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, she isn’t bothered by her own age: she is painting as prolifically as ever, often through the night. Her future ambitions? To be shown in all the major museums, of course. ‘I’ve always fancied the Louisiana in Denmark, Tate Modern would be nice… and MoMA.’ She is partly being serious, partly trying to keep a straight face. She
need not be so self-deprecating: the one-time ‘artist’s wife’ is now a Royal Academician in her own right and her windowsill is groaning with thick invitation cards to smart art-world parties and private views.
One wonders how Wylie’s new-found status as darling of the British art establishment sits with her maverick spirit. In truth, she treats the honour like a once-wayward pupil might respond to being made a school prefect: something to be proud of, but also to have fun with. ‘When Ai Weiwei met the Academicians, he bowed to us – it was wonderful! It is like being back in art school, really, because they are such a nice group and the RA is no longer just about commissions and men running it,’ she says, just as a purring Pete the cat knocks a couple of invitations off the ledge with his tail.
‘I am irreverent, I suppose,’ she says as we tramp through the weedy, waist-high bushes in her garden. ‘I’m not on anybody’s side, so I can say anything, at any time, contrary to what I’m supposed to be or say.’ Back inside, she leads the way through Oxlade’s former studio, which now houses a mix of both of their works, to the kitchen, where tendrils of jasmine have grown in through the roof and billow above the sink. As I clip on my cycle helmet to head off, Wylie takes down an ornate brass tin, withdraws a luxurious-looking ginger and dark chocolate biscuit and presses it into my hand. ‘That’s so miserable of me. I mean, I could give you two. But I’m afraid that some things are too special to share too much of.’
I am told that certain circles feel the same about Wylie and her work, but to put either on a pedestal or keep them a secret would perhaps be to miss her point: this is a painter who thinks artistic elitism is ‘naff ’ and wants her work to spread its wings. ‘It’s like with your children – you love them but don’t want them to be too dependent on you. You want them to be out there, being themselves. And you feel very warmly towards the person who has bothered to go to your show and buy the thing. Go safely! Mind the frogs on the road!’