Rose Wylie: “I love a way out. You rarely have a way out with painting”

On a blustery, overcast day at the tail end of winter, I stepped out of Faversham train station and gave a taxi driver an address in the neighbouring village of Newnham.

“Are you off to visit the artist?” the driver exclaimed.

“Yes. How did you know?”

“We are always dropping off people dressed like you at her place. She has a lot of people coming back and forth.”

I was wearing a dark black jacket, black shirt, and black jeans with a pair of boots. I didn’t think I necessarily stood out, but clearly I was more out of place than I realised.

Rose Wylie spent a long time in relative obscurity. Up until recently, I assume the taxi driver didn’t know an artist lived at the address. Now, from my understanding, she receives visitors on a weekly basis; I would assume a who’s who of the art world.

When we arrive at her house, I am surprised that an artist who has had several sell-out shows, museums clamouring for her work, and is represented by one of the biggest galleries in the world (David Zwirner), would live in such an unassuming small cottage. But then again, nothing about Rose Wylie is expected.

90-year-old Wylie is a beacon of hope for those of us playing the long game. A painter known for her often large-scale, seemingly naive paintings that bring together influences as wide-ranging as football to the Royal Family, Wylie only began to receive critical attention in her seventies. A breakthrough moment came when she won the Paul Hamlyn Award for visual arts, followed by her first retrospective at the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings. Her punchy, punk-ish aesthetic, cultivated over many years, finally attracted the upper echelons of the art world, with many blue-chip galleries clambering to represent her.

And here I was, standing outside the same cottage Wylie has lived in since 1969, where she developed her extraordinarily unique style. She lived with her husband, the painter Roy Oxlade, who passed away in 2016 just as Wylie’s career took off. I looked at it to see if I could feel any artistic aura, but nothing. To me, it was a picturesque cottage in the middle of Kent. A sign on the door said “deliveries to the back”, so I went to the side of the building down a muddy path and knocked on a small, warren-sized door.

A representative from the gallery opened the door and let me in. Being six feet four, I had to duck quite considerably to enter. The back door led right into the kitchen. It felt like another world, as if stepping into a cottage from Narnia. A kettle boiled on an old-fashioned stove. The wooden cupboards carried the patina of aged wear from the daily opening and closing to get mugs for tea.

Through the kitchen, we entered a glass conservatory. Branches from an outside tree encroached on the room and grew unkempt in the corner. It felt like the set of a fashion shoot, on a desk in the corner were copious flowers sent from Juergen Teller as a thank you following a recent campaign she starred in for Loewe. Looking equally as fashionable is Wylie, who sits on a wooden stool in a mustard yellow jumper and long blue skirt. The room, with empty bottles of booze on a table and unlit candlesticks, balances between a world totally disregarded and utterly stylish. You can’t fake authenticity.

Wylie has just finished an interview on Zoom and needs a few moments to finish her cup of tea before she starts another. Once adequately caffeinated, she leads me to her studio behind the kitchen. Initially a simple shed later added to the back of Wylie’s cottage, again, it is practical and unassuming. A soft light filters in through the unwashed windows. Proudly hung on raw, unstretched canvas are two paintings, both of which are to be presented at David Zwirner in April. One is a deep black painting, with two figures underneath which the names “Mary and Philip” (Mary I of England and Philip of Spain) are written. The larger of the two figures is Mary, who stands tall in regal dress, and behind her, a comically small figure of Philip, with short little legs, who appears to be floating.

“It was Philip’s skinny legs that interested me in the subject for the painting,” she explains. As evident in this painting, Wylie brings humour and image together in her work. She pulls me closer to the canvas and points out that Mary’s triangular face is layered with different cuts of canvas, each painted a different skin tone. “I love a way out. You rarely have a way out with painting. This way I can get it right if I make a mistake.” For someone whose paintings are so direct and raw, it’s fascinating to hear there are trepidations about mistakes.

Beside the painting, another figure in a cobalt blue dress stands with her left leg folded over her standing right leg. “It’s the type of pose women do, and I noticed my granddaughter doing it over Christmas,” she says. The figure is framed by a thick wooden beam running above her head, and beside her, another figure in a similar dress sits on some stairs. Wylie leads me back through the kitchen and into her front room. She orders me to sit on a bench and walks over to stand in front of me. “See, this is the painting you just saw,” she says.

I noted the stairs to the right. It was a strange moment, sitting in the spot where the painting was made. I had been allowed to enter Wylie’s world and was, as if walking through Monet’s lily garden, entering not only her home but stepping into the world of her paintings. For Wylie, her art is her life. The home I stood in was a manifestation of her entire life and practice – no distinction between art and life, for Wylie they are truly one and the same. Many people might claim this, but she is proof of it.

When I walked into the kitchen, I noted a group of cakes, colourful treats that looked as though they had just been opened. “This is a reminder of how many preservatives are in our food,” she says. “They have been there for over four years.” As well as being a warning sign of the level of processed food we consume, it also highlighted the timelessness of the world Wylie inhabits. 

She leads us up the stairs into her other, smaller studio. It’s most likely a former bedroom and the floor is strewn with newspapers. I note a date of 2007 on one of them. I am curious to know if, when she started getting recognition, she felt justified in her pursuits. “It was just good to show,” she explains. “What I really like is being included in major museums globally. That’s what matters.” I ask if she always imagined she would be part of these museums. “Yes,” she asserts.

The confidence Wylie exudes is intoxicating. She is a tour de force of life and humour. And to me, it comes out in her painting, direct and unabashed.

Once she has shown us the rest of the cottage, it is time for us to head out. I order a taxi, get in the car, and he looks disappointed. “Damn, I thought you were going to be Stewart Lee. He was here only recently.”