The Royal Academy is billing Rose Wylie as a \u201crebel artist\u201d for her forthcoming show and at 91, she finds there\u2019s still a lot to rebel against. An establishment that has long underrated women\u2019s work, for one: astonishingly, hers is the first solo show by a British woman to occupy all the academy\u2019s main galleries. Being pigeonholed is another: her giant canvases \u2013 with their bold colours, painted texts and wild juxtapositions (Nicole Kidman meets ancient Egypt at a Kent community centre) \u2013 have been compared to the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Philip Guston. But she does not identify with any one movement and dislikes art that is \u201cup your arse\u201d.<\/p>\n
For more than 60 years now, Wylie has lived in her low-slung, 17th-century house in Sittingbourne, Kent, where she rebels against conventional domesticity. Jasmine grows in a tangle through the kitchen ceiling and bouquets of dead flowers crowd another room. A ceramic horse given to her by the actor James Norton, a collector, lies by the windowsill. Next to the sink, two plates of petrified cakes are fuzzy with cobwebs. \u201cI bought that biscuit in Costa two years ago,\u201d says Sara, who works at Wylie\u2019s London gallery, pointing to one of them. She thinks there\u2019s a Battenberg buried somewhere upstairs in the studio.<\/p>\n
double quotation markI didn\u2019t like The Traitors. The one who runs it \u2013 visually she\u2019s not my type. Too spooky<\/p>\n
It would be rude and wrong to describe the house as a mess. There are extraordinary amounts of stuff, but it is clean and tidy, because though Wylie lives alone she loves a visitor. Logs burn in an open fireplace, and she compliments the colour of my tights (blue-grey). We realise I\u2019ve dressed as a sort of tribute, because Wylie often works in tights and a skirt, but today she wears grey checked trousers and a navy pullover, accessorised with plum lipstick. She likes clothes \u2013 \u201cthe nearest people get to painting and sculpture in their everyday lives\u201d \u2013 and was recently photographed here by Juergen Teller for a Loewe campaign. \u201cHe had a little pink camera,\u201d Wylie says delightedly, \u201cand one pink fingernail.\u201d<\/p>\n
We climb the stairs to her studio, which is hung with strip lights and thickly carpeted with newspaper, a tsunami of Guardian pages cresting around dried cans of oil paint. It is deliciously soft to walk on, far better for a painter\u2019s back than concrete, she points out. Can we also agree not to call it \u201cdetritus\u201d? \u201cJournalists talk about the paper, and it\u2019s off the point. My attitude is that you don\u2019t come in and clear up. You come in and work.\u201d Before the pandemic, a Korean team photographed the room inch by inch and recreated it in Seoul. During lockdown, Wylie watched people post pictures from this replica studio on Instagram \u2013 \u201cthese superbly dressed women, in this environment. It was a marvellous contrast.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nicole Kidman at a Kent community centre \u2026 Wylie\u2019s Black Strap (Red Fly). Photograph: \u00a9 Rose Wylie<\/p>\n
Marvellous contrast is at the heart of her work, which is driven not by theme or autobiography but by images she finds interesting \u2013 be they from a Roman mosaic, TV or early Renaissance art. It\u2019s the vast mental leaps Wylie makes that give her paintings their energy and wit: a curving footpath in her garden becomes a gun becomes a tribute to Werner Herzog\u2019s 2009 film My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? She talks me through a favourite canvas in the kitchen, an aerial shot of second world war bombs flying over the desert. \u201cDoodlebugs did not go over the desert, they went from Calais to London.\u201d Wylie points to a large silhouette at the bottom of the painting. \u201cAnd here is a black duck, because that\u2019s Arezzo, and Italian cities have emblems. Arezzo doesn\u2019t have a duck, but I thought it\u2019d be fun.\u201d She put two women on the bomb wings, also \u201cfor fun\u201d.<\/p>\n
Fun is what it\u2019s about. Wylie\u2019s eyes are full of mischief as she explains her peculiar lines of thinking, while her adoring tabby, Pete, sleeps under her chin. All the work for the Royal Academy has been shipped, but four new canvases are stapled to the walls, two inspired by a fence. \u201cThe top of my garden used to be completely secluded \u2013 the ivy had taken over. But my neighbour needed a new fence, and men came with a digger and cleared the space. That was upsetting. But I\u2019ve rescued the loss by making it into a painting.\u201d She is calling the result, a bold diptych featuring a lemon-yellow house poking above an orange fence, Jumbo Meat Chopper, because the two elements make the shape of a blade. \u201cI\u2019m absolutely delighted with it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sixteen years ago, Wylie was virtually unknown; today her work hangs in Los Angeles, Cologne and Ghent. The painting of Kidman in Kent, Black Strap (Red Fly), sold for \u00a3220,500 in 2021. After studying at Folkestone and Dover Art<\/a> School in the 1950s, Wylie took 20 years out to raise her three children, and didn\u2019t get her big break until 2010, aged 76, when she was selected for a group show at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC. The same year Germaine Greer, then a Guardian columnist, came to visit.<\/p>\n double quotation markPeople say: \u2018Are you angry?\u2019 I was never angry<\/p>\n