‘In painting,” the artist Rose Wylie says, “I don’t like too much pernickety, precious fiddling about. Perhaps you’ve noticed.” Wylie, 91 (or “blinking old”, as she puts it), is unstuffy, funny and forthright. Any interviewer trying to get her on trauma or thwarted ambition or feminism is met with a sound between a scoff and a snort.
Born in 1934, she studied painting at Dover School of Art from 1952 and graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in 1981. Big gap — take note. She stopped painting when her children were born and didn’t get going again for decades.
Wylie: “I don’t like too much pernickety, precious fiddling about”
TRISTAN FEWINGS/GETTY IMAGES FOR ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS
She was an up-and-comer at an age when most artists are up and over the hill. She became a Royal Academician at a stripling 80 and had a solo show at the Serpentine when she was 83. Now she is the first British woman painter to have an exhibition in the Royal Academy’s first-floor galleries.
There’s certainly nothing pernickety, precious or fiddling here. Take me as you find me, I’m as finished as I’ll ever be — that’s the Wylie way. When she’s on song her works have a larky life of their own. She borrows from film stills, snips images from piles of cuttings. She goes in for arrows, annotations and titles in ALL CAPS. Her paintings have the gift of the gab. They announce themselves, argue the point, cram in names and dates. Often the text runs off the edge as if Wylie hasn’t got to the end of her senten…
Snowwhite (3) with Duster
© ROSE WYLIE. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND DAVID ZWIRNER. PHOTO: JO MOON PRICE
Study for Red Twink, 2002
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND DAVID ZWIRNER © ROSE WYLIE. PHOTO: JACK HEMS
Who could look at her Pink Skater (Will I Win, Will I Win) and not share its gliding elation? The massive four-canvas Park Dogs & Air Raid excitedly captures a child’s-eye view of an air fight over Kensington Gardens in 1940. It’s a sophisticated translation, naive but knowingly so, of what would have appealed to a little girl: the pond, the ducks, the dogs, the phut-phut-phut of the planes. Paint hangs off the bottom of the canvas in great, set-hard gobs.
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The duds, however, outnumber the triumphs. Often, there’s a sense that a Christmas cracker has been pulled. The painting goes off with a bang… then nothing falls out. There’s an immediate visual impact but little lasting reward. I kept staring, waiting for the big reveal.
Wylie works hard at her coarseness. She labours at paintings, patches unsatisfactory sections, paints over what came before. Spontaneity can feel as if it has been pulled from a stone.
Yellow Strip, 2006
© ROSE WYLIE. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND DAVID ZWIRNER. PHOTO: JACK HEMS
Reading the captions in this frustratingly hit-and-miss exhibition, I wondered if Wylie and her curators weren’t having us on. Try this one: “The dark umber background creates a flat spatial plane for an overhead view of the plate, with the addition of the word BREAKFAST helping to bring into focus the spoon, posed ready to scoop up the locally sourced red and purple berries. The work can also be read obliquely as a climate-change painting, promoting the consumption of seasonal produce.”
If that isn’t worth a scoff and a snort, I don’t know what is.
★★★☆☆
Royal Academy, London, Feb 28 to April 19 (royalacademy.org.uk)