The Brooklyn Rail

Born in 1934, Rose Wylie recalls in conversation and work alike an early childhood in India and wartime England, skies streaked with buzz bombs. As a teen in art school, Wylie studied figurative painting, a fact perhaps unsurprising given how her works teem with so much life. But hers is an oeuvre marked as much by remembrance as observation, showing in most instances the welcome perversion of the latter by measures of time and distance, but also technologies of mediation, inclusive of drawing. A latter-day Ovidian visual culture well suited to the vulgarities of our mediagenic surround, Wylie’s immanent landscapes mine the uncouthness of celebrity and transformation, the siren calls of patronizing reinvention together with the hard-earned volition of becoming. And they do this with a companionable, even relational effort at understanding.

When Wylie returned to the Royal College of Art in London, in 1979, she had raised three children. Her first solo exhibition took place in 1985 at the Trinity Arts Centre, in Kent, where she still works in the cottage where she has lived for more than half a century. It bears mention that her career 2.0 got going in the context of an emergent Neo-Expressionism exemplified by the masculinist ethos of A New Spirit in Painting (1981)—and a run of international exhibitions held at the Whitechapel Gallery curated by Nicholas Serota. This happened, too, alongside the subsequent recuperation of Howard Hodgkin and the School of London in addition to the promotion of contemporary Expressionists. Her work ethic is now legendary, and she has been sanguine about the delay in her own more sustained public presence, which did nevertheless effect a space of intentionality for the work. From here, her mode of appropriation feels as central to this period, and to ours, as anything.

I spoke with Rose Wylie on September 11, 2023, on the occasion of her first show in Los Angeles, at David Zwirner Gallery. This interview is an edited and condensed version of our conversation.

Suzanne Hudson (Rail): I wanted to start with the title of your Los Angeles show, CLOSE, not too close. Can you tell me about the title of the exhibition? Does it relate in some way to Coleridge?

Rose Wylie: Yes, it’s nothing to do with proximity—with being near someone or some place. It’s about making an image which is like what it’s come from, but not a copy—it keeps certain distinct characteristics, but flips into what I hope is a poetic transformation. Coleridge refers to it (in his dislike of “wax-work” realism), as the “likeness in the unlikeness.” So, “Close, not too close” refers to image-connection in all its found and poetically-projected aspects, which are not imitation, and also to synthesis, that is, the use of everything at your disposal, and by that I mean a response in the work to what is seen, sensed, or felt. And it’s that which is so hard to do. I have, as well, used his “likeness in the unlikeness” before, as an earlier exhibition title, so this is a “now-extension” with a similar meaning.

Rail: You have talked in the past about how you metabolize references, and I wonder if you would share more about your process as a form of translation that hews close to the sources but also transforms them.

Wylie: Things come in all the time, you see them. I’m mainly interested in how things look; it’s not about psychological issues or plots or identity. I think we’re all terribly concerned about how things look. We may not say so, but I think we are.

There’s a certain amount of transformation that goes on with how I work, like with a film or a person or a house. My House (2022) is like that. The painting’s got the same shape as my house. And the same set of windows. And the door and chimneys are in the same place. But it isn’t a camera shot of my house. It’s not as dark as that, and it’s made of brick. But my house is horizontal, not vertical. It’s isolated. The “likes” and the “unlikes” come together in the painting.

Rail: In a conversation with Charlotte Flint, you talk about resisting imposed structures. But there appear to be working principles that you keep, like that the house has the same number of windows. It doesn’t seem to be about realism but some correspondences that you maintain.

Wylie: Well, I’m not sure there are rules. I do tend to think if I’m painting someone who’s tall, I probably go along with the fact that they are tall rather than have them looking like a round balloon. But that’s not a rule because while you’re painting the whole thing changes, but I think the correspondences you’re talking about connect to “quality.” Do you paint?

Rail: I do. Just for myself.

Wylie: Do you have rules?

Rail: Well, maybe more frameworks than rules. I usually start with something that comes from somewhere else. For continuity, I guess, to remind myself where I am. And I think it’s because I mostly write… and hate a blank page. Sometimes I start with sentences that I wrote about something else and figure out why they are invalid for the new context. I got into writing about art because I painted, but I also liked writing more than painting.

Wylie: I can see why. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff that is the same: choices, options, how to do it, style, what you put in, what you don’t. But, when you’ve written something, you can keep it. You can insert it if you want to. When you paint, you paint it out. And it’s gone. It can just drive you nuts because you can’t get it back. If you do, you don’t like it much, but that’s the process. That’s the whole thing. Let it move along.

Rail: I was curious about that with all the layering. A lot of your drawings have multiple sheets of paper, and the paintings have passages where paint is clearly covering earlier marks. These tracings are so emphatic and the alternatives are literally under them. Do you photograph works while you’re making them?

Wylie: I do. All the time. I’m constantly at my camera and at my computer. But go back to the house. I did the drawing first. And the drawing took nine hours. I timed it. I kept changing it. Can I tell you about it?

Rail: Yes, please.

Wylie: For the drawing of the house—3 Cowslips, study for MY HOUSE painting (2020)—there was the plant on the right. It wasn’t the house I’m talking about now. Beside the house there’s a plant, a blackberry plant, a very ordinary plant that grows on bomb sites. It’s not a florist type. It’s not a special plant. It’s a very common plant. In fact, people get rid of it whenever they can. And it grows in my garden. I’d done a drawing of it. I had the leaves in front of me and I’d drawn directly from them. I don’t always do that. I often draw from memory, but not always. I’m quite wide in how I draw. Anyway, I looked at this drawing and I thought, it’s so bad. It’s so dull and flat; it’s graphic. Like advertising. It looks like a drawing that every art student in the world could and would do, and should then discard. So I thought, well, I’ll work on it because I have nothing to lose. So I did, bit by bit, but it was never right. I went on for about seven hours, which is quite a long time to sit drawing on the same sheet of paper. I left it and then came back the next day and did another two hours because I still thought I couldn’t leave it like that. I sliced it with a Stanley knife and glued on the new corrections. But I kept the endless small throw-outs; they were records of change, of decisions made. I kept them in a hand-constructed envelope. Anyway, after nine hours, I got the drawing how I wanted it. And then I made the painting from the drawing. And the painting has kept the quality of the drawing. Not the first drawing, but the final drawing.

Rail: Beyond the physical remnants, do the texts function as reminders of decisions, too?

Wylie: I’ve seen a lot of films. I love films, and film photography, but I don’t want my paintings to look like photographs. And if you’ve seen a lot of films, they all start to merge, or they do with me. But if you write it in, if you write bits of information about the film into your painting, you tend to remember how the letter “G” went wrong, when you painted it: it was too big, too thick, it was the wrong color. It helps lodge the title in your mind, so it becomes a kind of mnemonic, yes, but I also like the look of writing in paintings. I like illustrated manuscripts where there’s text and image, and also images in newspapers and magazines.

And I think writing is a method of unifying the painting. It’s easier than doing a face! Faces are very difficult because they can go completely wrong, just crap. They get the wrong “look.” But writing has a kind of formality about it, and also it’s familiar, but the thing is, I often say one thing and then mean the opposite. Saying that writing is familiar… I don’t like things to be too familiar because you get into an easy way of doing it. So sometimes I’ve done Russian writing, or Persian writing, simply because it’s a different shape. It has a different look to it, so familiarity goes out of the window here. I do longhand, lowercase and capital, and don’t mind if the spelling goes wrong. I often start in the middle of the painting and then go backwards through words, which encourages misspelling.

Rail: I wanted to ask about that. Where do the paintings start?

Wylie: Who knows where the paintings start? You could tell me. [Laughs]

Rail: Well, what about the iterative dimension? And some of them seem so page-like, even when they’re so squarely within the world of painting. When I look at them, I don’t know how to scan them, which I find really exciting. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be reading them from left to right or top to bottom, or—

Wylie: You mean the image or the writing?

Rail: Well, both.

Wylie: I’ll tell you what, I’m terribly intrigued, because while I’m listening to you I’m also looking at the fabric of your blouse. I did a painting of a Mexican singer, and she had on a pattern very like the pattern on your blouse. And I keep looking at it and wondering how and why it looks so like it. And whether you—you didn’t do it on purpose? You didn’t see the painting?

Rail: No, no…

Wylie: I did it out big, the pattern. I separated it off the garment, off her frock, and I enlarged it onto the canvas on the right side of the painting. She is a singer, she was on YouTube. And she was constantly moving. So I had to keep chasing this image of the textile design of her frock.

Rail: That’s wild.

Wylie: It’s intriguing. It’s like a sort of déjà vu kind of moment; it’s come off the painting, and she’s facing me from—are you in New York at the moment?

Rail: No, I’m in Los Angeles.

Wylie: You will probably say to me, “You know it’s not a bit like it. It’s not at all like the textile.” And you will be very, very irritated because the singer is very square and very short. And you’ll say, “It’s not a bit like me,” but I haven’t said it’s like you. It’s like the pattern. It’s like the textile design. She isn’t like you at all.

Rail: I will find it.

Wylie: Ask to see it.

Rail: I will, I absolutely will! Well, may I ask you about a couple other works in the show that were sticking with me? The way the LA gallery is constructed, there’s a kind of small antechamber where some of the drawings are on the right-hand side and the painting, Greg’s Flowers (2023), is on the left. And then the space opens out from there. Greg’s Flowers seems like an offering.

Wylie: Greg—I don’t know his last name—directs a print business, and he did the print for picky people notice… at S.M.A.K., which was the museum show in Belgium that I had before coming to LA. He arrived for me to have a look at it, and in his hand he had a bunch of extraordinarily pretty flowers. One of the things that I sometimes say is that we should give respect to brambles and wildflowers and leaves and stuff like that, rather than going and buying expensive bunches of beauty from florists. Anyway, he had these very small flowers. And I also had hit a point in my painting-life where I have become very interested in botanical painting. They are very precise. So I labeled the flowers with straight lines and in neat fanciful writing. It’s a pretty painting—like the flowers.

Rail: I thought it was such a beautiful opening to the show, so honest about means and not concerned with being overly precious. “Waste not want not” and such, and things and materials being left as they are. I was looking through some of your past catalogues and I was really struck by the Twink & Ivy, and Other Paintings and Small Drawings: 1999–2003 book from 2004. On the very first page it says, “Work has been mostly photographed in ordinary room conditions; this is deliberate. It shows the uneven light in which paintings are usually seen. The paintings are nearly all unstretched.” Just the integrity…

Wylie: Well it’s all of that. They’re still all unstretched in the studio. In fact, I think they look—I’m conflicted, I like some stretched, but I also like them unstretched and slightly uneven and waving along the bottom, a bit like tapestries. You can push them about, you can attach them together; it gives freedom and flexibility. And I do like ordinary lighting. I mean you’re absolutely right, you know, you’ve picked it out… I do like ordinary lighting and ordinary flowers. I think the ordinary is very unordinary, in fact. It’s very special and very good. And deserves respect.

Rail: Do you ever work on the reverse?

Wylie: Early on. I don’t anymore.

Rail: Your paintings are so physically prepossessing, the way they take up space and the way they’re so factual. They suggest that one consider what happens where they end, or on the back. They seem very much like objects as well as images.

Wylie: Yes, I think they are a bit object. A long time ago, someone came down from the Arts Council in London and she said she thought that the paintings were sculptural. I do like the edges showing and the threads, they buckle a bit, and pick up paint, sometimes they bubble. I especially like joins and “stick-ons.”

Rail: Another one I was really curious about was Lying in the Sun (2023). It has a strange dimension of looking almost like a kind of snow angel or sand angel, caught in some moment of self-absorbed pleasure. Yet we see the body from on top, at a strange angle, and it warns of being a “cautionary tale.”

Wylie: A bit like someone floating down, like Icarus or something. Interestingly enough, the whole of the canvas is covered with paint. Often, there’s a lot of bare canvas left. Lying in the Sun is pretty well covered. When we started, we were talking about whether I have rules. I thought, What color is sand? Well, it is often a kind of gingery color, so I put a huge ginger cross right across the painting from top to bottom, from left to right, which has given the painting a kind of endless shape. I didn’t know whether it came out for you, but it has a kind of bend, it appears to bend because of the insert of the color green, and the color is quite thick. I know that if you lie in the sun too long you can get moles, which might turn out to be cancerous. So it’s a cautionary tale. If you lie too much in the sun, you can get moles popping up on your back later on. And anyway, it’s all such an effort; never mind the tan, why not just read a good book in a chair?

Rail: The press release says something about the inadvertent relation to Los Angeles that some of the pieces here assumed. This one and Yoga Pose (2021) did feel appropriate to the context even though that wasn’t where the work came from. Under the looming Hollywood sign there are inevitably correspondences.

Wylie: It was unintentional, which is the interesting thing. I wasn’t against anything relating to LA, but I didn’t work in that way. I did nothing site-specific. Lying in the Sun is from New York and brings in the New York Fire Department. Usefully, I decided that the letter “F” stood for “fire,” not “federal.” She looks hot, and lucky… there is a sprinkler to cool her off, which I thought was quite funny. And, I wanted to make a kind of shorthand, a clue, for saying “this is the sea” about that bit of green. How do you make sure that people read it as sea, when it’s not particularly sea-shape and it’s green? People tend to think the sea is blue, but it’s not always. So I thought if I put a boat on it, that’ll kind of clear things up. I didn’t know what sort of boat to put in, and I went to the web and looked up boats outside New York. I got a lot of images, and I picked the sprinkler. I thought it fitted the hot body. It’s a bit like hell, like a medieval painting… with a contemporary cooling system. And I liked the contrasting flicks of black on white at the top of the painting, like fish-bones or feathers.

Rail: Right. It’s almost like depictions of flayed skin. Maybe that’s why I thought of it as an angel form also, but in a kind of grotesque way, with the body being pulled to its extremities. Picking up on the semiotic game of the sea, could you say more about the idea of shorthand? Of certain forms standing in for others with such efficiency?

Wylie: I’ve often done grass. If the scene is outside, I’ll put three blades of green to signify outside; there may be no other clue at all to tell you. Or if it’s sky, put a cloud. If it’s a woman, stick a skirt on. It’s repetition, which I like. In a painting you put the grass on… you’re repeating the motif, it’s personal usage, you’re doing it again. We have a great deal of repeat in our lives, anyway, without plugging into film or music, poetry or painting. And I do like repeat. So I use it. And I think shorthand is one of the repeats that I use. Do you do shorthand, or probably you just do typing?

Rail: I just do typing, but, and this is unrelated, I type with two fingers. I never learned to type properly. It’s a kind of adaptive mechanism, I guess. So it would be very—

Wylie: And probably very quickly with two fingers.

Rail: Yeah, it would be too hard to retrain myself.

Wylie: It is something you can do, something you got used to and actually works for you. So why change it? But I think it’s the same thing with grass… or clouds. It can unify the painting in the same way that an outline can. I think Fernand Léger used to say that the outline unifies the painting. You need something which makes the painting come together. Otherwise, it’s just a disparate kind of nothing, so you’ve got to kind of get it going. I think repeated things and the use of writing, and shorthand, can do that.

Rail: Let’s talk about HAND, Drawing as Central (2022), the triptych with the hand that repeats a similar image across those panels. It is so much about a meta-history of drawing, and the history of your own work across time and space. It’s a version of self-portraiture, but through emblematizing process: how you work or something.

Wylie: I started with a drawing of the hand, and then I did an ink painting of the drawing. And then an oil painting of all three stages in six feet across each canvas, and it became a kind of a statement that drawing for me is important. I do a lot of drawing. And this painting is about drawing being completely central. And that’s why I put the drawing right in the middle of the triptych. It is a self-portrait because it’s my hand, and it’s very raw. In painting I don’t like too much persnickety, precious fiddling about. Perhaps you’ve noticed.

So I felt it was in a sense a self-portrait of how I am, not how I look, but what I do. I paint directly, I don’t fiddle about with paint. Well, as I said, I conflict—I do fiddle about with it, and I don’t. I start not fiddling about, and then I do fiddle about. So, in certain parts of a painting I fiddle about endlessly and in other parts I just put paint on like a broom. I also like contrast. You can get small bits which can take a long, long time to do. And you have fiddled about, but it doesn’t look as though you have because every time you fiddle with it, you paint it out, put on more paint and start again on the top.

Rail: Does that get harder as you go along? I was thinking about Willem de Kooning, and how Clement Greenberg was so hard on him for what he called his “facility.” When you get so proficient at a particular way of working, does it actually become a hindrance?

Wylie: It can be a hindrance; sometimes it isn’t. I think a certain amount of facility somewhere can be a good thing because you need to get what you want. But you might not know what you want, that’s the thing.

Rail: When you were in school at the Royal College of Art, from 1979 to 1981, you wrote an MA dissertation on the language of drawing and how it was taught in English art schools. I don’t know how to ask it exactly, but how, if at all, did this research into historical models become useful to your practice?

Wylie: Yes, because drawing is central. The sort of stuff I really like is prehistoric. It is just so good. I love ancient wall painting. I do think my work possibly touches—I call it trans-temporality. I mean, people have said that they look at the painting and they mistakenly have thought that I’m twenty-eight because they think it’s of the now. But I hope the kind of painting I do will just go on because it’s not about a blip. It’s not about a fashion. It’s always been there. People have always painted a flower or a mouse or bird or… it’s just going on. But I don’t know how the historical models come in. Otherwise, I think they’re just—I think the whole visual thing is so important. History is just various instances of how it was done then. Artists have always dealt visually with what they’re looking at, and that’s what I do.

Rail: Something that strikes me is this question of fandom, or the affinity one feels to certain kinds of visual sources, and not necessarily in the sense of celebrating them but acknowledging the communities that form around them. There’s a really brilliant communications scholar, Henry Jenkins, who writes about participatory cultures and their literacies. One of the kinds of things he’s interested in analyzing is how we become producers as much as consumers of this broad media world…

Wylie: I don’t necessarily endorse what I’m looking at. For instance, I’m not particularly interested in football, but I’ve made quite a few football drawings, because footballers are available and people know them. So you’re sharing a known subject—well, in your country they probably don’t know ours. But here they’re like gods. If you’re painting a well-known footballer the audience can see what you’ve done with it. That lets the viewer in. But it could be this or it could be that. The whole thing’s open, except I’m quite picky about the qualities that I look for.

We meet the world in different ways. We certainly do. I think openness rather than being shut-off and restricted is obviously a good thing: to be open, but not too open. Anyway, I think the whole thing is knife edge. Did you have a favorite painting?

Rail: Well, I really liked Lying in the Sun. But I also was struck by the Pink News Reader (2022), which first made me think of the Francis Bacon-esque Julian Schnabel rendition of Warhol on velvet, Portrait of Andy Warhol (1982). The black space and the centered protagonist in yours helped me to see how posed so many of the works’ subjects are and the devices of framing that you use to bring certain things into visibility more than others.

Wylie: I love borders and flags. I don’t mean borders between countries, I mean borders or edges, emblems. I often work on canvas-color. I needed another color. So I thought, put black on it. And then pink is good with black. And then I love flags, especially tribal Asafo flags—why not put a pink line around it. And anyway, the newsreader herself, she was so fantastic. She was strikingly gorgeous. She had bright yellow hair parted in the middle, flat against her head and then tight little ringlets each side. She was very unusual, and very special looking. And she was reading this appalling news from Ukraine. She was telling the most horrific stories and she looked marvelous, kind of ameliorating… and what a contrast. I am very fond of that painting. I did another one that was in Seoul, at Frieze.

Rail: The dissonance of this is perfect. And she is spectral, translucent, but totally composed.

Wylie: I once thought acting would be fun, but then I hate performance. [Laughs] So I wouldn’t. And also, I can’t remember my lines. And the thing about painting is you don’t have to remember stuff. When you do, you remember visual stuff. But visual stuff is not the same as facts.

Rail: Sure, but the “visual stuff” becomes facts.

Wylie: I like stuff that goes across time, through trans-temporality, or whatever you want to call it. And I very much like cultures which were excluded from my art-education when I was a student. They literally didn’t exist in that education. It was all determined resistance. I suppose you haven’t asked me artists I like. I don’t care. I like so many.

Rail: I kind of got that sense. The work is so erudite, but you wear it so lightly. Every piece has a million references.

Wylie: It is absolutely true. If you wish to delve conceptually into them and write about them, they will be rewarding, but they don’t look like that. You could miss it. They’re not blatantly clever. That’s not the point. I mean, you could have a very clever painting and it can be completely—visually it can be nothing.

Rail: I think it’s a virtue of who you are and what you’ve seen and read and experienced that so much of the world might appear in any of them.

Wylie: Yes, a barber, a pope, a piece of history… El Greco… a worm: it is what you put together, but it’s also how you put what you put together. Which is terribly important. And I’m very concerned with transformation, as I said, a poetic transformation, which means that the resulting imagery isn’t this or that. I hope it has been transformed into a poetic image, which I think is central to what I do. I don’t know how that comes out. But anyway, the more people read into it, that’s fine. I don’t mind, that’s absolutely fine. I’m glad you like the newsreader. Someone said she looked like a goddess, an ancient goddess.

Rail: I thought that, too, with the Yellow Marzipan Girl (2022), evoking the Venus of Willendorf.

Wylie: Someone said to me that she was like the Statue of Liberty. She isn’t, but she could have been. She’s a sculptural sweet about ten inches high, wrapped up in cellophane. I didn’t eat it. I kept it for about forty or thirty-five years, and finally painted her.

Rail: There’s something so kind of archetypal about this body and this—

Wylie: —with nipple-flicks off her chest; that was all really good, like solutions in ancient Egyptian art. And her eyes are good. I’ve recently done another of those repeating-girls. It’s called Smoking, it’s another cautionary tale. And this time I’ve done a pretty one. So there are three: there’s the one in LA, there’s one in Melbourne, and there’s one in my studio here. I do quite often like to try the same thing again: you can leave it for a year or ten years or a week… twenty years, and then do it again.

You’re looking at the earlier work and you’re thinking you could do it again, but it’s going to be different because the time is different and you’re different. The context has changed and possibly what you liked then you don’t like so much now, and you want to do a smaller head or bigger head, or change the face. Anyway, I think we are changing all the time.