No objection to glamour

Next time you travel by train through the Medway towns, look out at Rainham Station and imagine Hollywood superstar Nicole Kidman, standing tall and slender in front of the Oast Community Centre. A-listers periodically burnish the Kentish landscape in the world of Rose Wylie’s painting. Here, fellow Kent-local, writer and design researcher Miranda Vane, meets the iconoclast painter in her studio to discuss some of Wylie’s works.

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Oast, Rainham

Text by Miranda Vane

A few years ago I moved to the Kent North Downs. It doesn’t feel like the sort of place where you might find an international art world superstar, so I had to rethink my first impressions when I heard that the painter and incidental style icon Rose Wylie lives a short way down the valley. Her 17th-century home and studio has become almost as well-known as her exuberant paintings. Right now it’s full of ossifying bouquets sent by admirers of her Royal Academy show, the first retrospective in the main galleries by a British female artist in the institution’s history. As a show of new work was opening at David Zwirner in Paris, she squeezed in some time to talk to me between visits from a tall Dutch photographer from Flash Art, a Chinese curator who was heading on to Margate to talk to the other grande dame of Kentish art, some people from the RA bringing editions to sign and a David Zwirner director making a last-minute selection of drawings to send to France. It is a wonder Wylie ever has time to paint.

Miranda Vane It was thrilling to go to the RA show knowing that you live just down the road. So inevitably I spent a lot of time looking for Kentish bits and clues. I loved seeing The Oast Community Centre, Rainham. I knew you must have seen it from the train.

Rose Wylie The train stops right outside The Oast. At one point, I had painted Rochester Castle. I wanted a big solid square shape. I saw Rochester Castle, and it’s unadorned. From a distance, it’s very simple, square and strong, so I used it. I don’t do hierarchical subject matter. I don’t do houses because they’re privileged – I’ve painted my house and the house next door, even a chicken hut. On this occasion I saw the Oast Community Centre on the other side of the railway track, which used to be a prison I think. Now it’s a recreation centre where all sorts of good stuff goes on. I thought, “That’s heaven.” I’ve got the big square that I wanted to put behind Nicole Kidman. She’s tall and slender and vertical, so she needs a horizontal. Rochester Castle was drawn from the train. I did the other one when I got home.

MV I was struck by the beautiful hazel leaf in your RA show, particularly how you painted the edge onto that white paper. It holds its presence so beautifully.

RW They are the most beautiful shapes, but they also sit in – it sounds like art speak – space. I don’t know how else to describe it; they just sit in a very beautiful way. I look at them and think, they’re just it, they’re priceless. Often in paint, I build the edges thick; it’s physical. The word is materiality. It used to be physicality, but you know how words go in and out of fashion. I love the ordinariness of the hazel. I’ve got tonnes of it in the garden. And also they grow fan-shaped from the ground. They don’t have a central trunk and then leaves at the top. I point them out to people and say, “Look at the way they grow.”

MV Am I right in thinking you used to teach painting classes in your garden?

RW That is fake. A journalist said it. We did classes in the summer in Tunbridge Wells, not in the garden. But a lot of students from Cambridge have stayed here, so I can see how the notion got confused and grew. We had a lot of parties here with a lot of undergraduates and art students.

MV And your own art education?

RW I suppose you would call it old school, because I did anatomy, perspective and architecture. We had to do composition from memory. I do cross-hatching sometimes. I love cross-hatching. I think a lot of people looking at what and how I paint don’t think that I’d have done perspective or cross-hatching. For instance, in the RA show, there is a painting called 3 Seating Plans and Seated Table (2025). The left-hand one has a table, but instead of getting smaller as it goes away, it gets slightly bigger as it goes away. That’s not me making a mistake of Western perspective. It’s me using Eastern perspective, because that’s what they did. And if you do that, the public says you haven’t learnt at all, which is slightly stupid. If you look at old paintings and Russian icons and earlier Renaissance and Medieval they often do that. That’s not because they were badly taught or wrong. To my surprise, I found Hockney had just mentioned the very same thing in an interview about Eastern and Western perspectives. Obviously, I know he’s done it, but so have I. There’s a parallelism going on without our knowing. The table goes out, so that’s Eastern in the painting. But the candles along the middle of the table, they get smaller. So the candles are Western, and the table is Eastern, and the candles are sitting on the table. You have an exchange. I think that freedom is the point, you can do what you want.

MV You seem to draw a lot of your paintings from social situations and dinners. There’s a lot of fun and conviviality in them.

RW Dinner is a good moment, isn’t it? In the old days, there were a lot of artists and friends coming here, and a lot of drinking and talking, a lot of exchange, a lot of irritation. Now, not so much. My memory is not super good. It’s not age, I’ve always had it. Quite often, I write people’s names in my diary so I can remember them. This morning, I was flicking through my diary, and I saw there was a bit that looked like a Viking boat with oars and sails. I wondered why I had drawn a Viking boat. I paused and had a look, and I saw it was the table. So that’s why I started the right-hand painting. It grew, and then, because of that, I did the one of the left. The left one is saturated with heavy paint. If you stand close, there’s lots of materiality, edges and cutting. Sloppy, slimy, dreary, thin, thick, fuzzy. I playfully call this one Rothko because Rothko had saturated paints. The one on the right I called Rembrandt because Rembrandt had a painting with a lot of heads. And I don’t usually do so many heads. There are 17 heads in it. And so my affectionate name was Rothko and Rembrandt.

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Yellow Strip

MV Do you watch a lot of football? I loved your football paintings.

RW No. I’ve given up. It was good subject matter because people know Rooney, and they knew Crouch and Lehmann at the time. They knew Ronaldinho. It’s called poetic transformation. I’ve done a lot of drawings of Cantona. They often turn up in the newspapers, or people see them on television, so they become familiar. They are known, and they are images available to everybody.

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Bagdad Café 2015

MV I get a strong sense of the feeling of things from your paintings, particularly licking the coffee spoon. I know from the painting exactly what that feels like.

RW I love that painting. I love the colour. Those are my teeth licking the spoon. They are slightly irregular. The flower on the left was growing in the field, it’s convolvulus. People simply walk on it because it hugs the ground. I thought it was just beautiful, and if it were bigger, or imported and difficult to grow, it would be expensive. But people don’t even see and they walk on it. And this purple plant on the right grows on my lawn because I haven’t cut it for 17 years. So, this grows if you let your lawn go wild. It’s related to a geranium, though it doesn’t look like one. But it only grows if you don’t stick a grass-cutter over it, so this is Let Nature Be. It was bought by the British Council, so it could go to Venezuela or Finland or Moscow.

MV I found myself walking through Mayfair late one Friday night, and it struck me that it might as well be a completely different planet from Kent. I wonder whether you feel differently about your canvases when they go out into the world?

RW No. I just think it’s nice that they’re out there. This one, Dinner Outside (2024) has been bought by a Greek shipping tycoon for his collection. Apparently his museum is being built by Renzo Piano. And he also bought 3 Seating Plans and Seated Table (2025) and I’m so pleased that they’re together. This painting came about because I was talking about architecture with Luke John [Oxlade, Wylie’s son] who did History of Art at Cambridge. I said I liked the shape [of the gable] and he said, “Oh, you mean the Dutch influence”, and I said, “Whatever, I’m not good on labels, but there’s one up the road”.

MV Doddington Place, you can see it from the road.

RW It’s a good shape. I also did Syon House, which is very simple. It’s just a rectangle with castellations. It’s direct, simple and strong, and it’s very useful in painting. It reminded me very slightly of Picasso’s Guitar (1912) in cardboard. It’s got a lovely pure feel to it.

So, I said to Luke John that I’d done a drawing of the Dutch gable of the house up the road and he said, “But there are two!” I went back to the painting and stuck the second one on. So it is an example of an exchange with your children. I had to make the second roofline look like the first. People say I just do things without thinking, but I had to match it because of the reality of the building. The right one is painted in, the left hand one is bare canvas.

MV And here are some cars!

RW This car looks like you could drive it away. It’s a heavy sports car, it’s not any old trash. It looks very like a Rolls Royce.

This idea of doing grass is a swipe from medieval manuscripts. It’s a shorthand for “we are outside”. It’s grass-like, but it’s not grass. So I do it often if it’s a scene outside, just to say you’re outside. Or I place dots for gravel. I’ve never done gravel before, so I thought, how can I do gravel in the same way that the medieval painters did for grass? I know they haven’t done gravel.

MV Did they even have gravel?

RW It doesn’t matter. I did various attempts. You have to keep them fairly formal, or they start to look like something else. They start to look like Hockney or other artists. The only thing to do is to keep them fairly mechanical. This tends to unify the painting. Once you’ve got the colour, it’s not demanding, like a face. So I thought, with the 3 Seating Plans and Seated Table, I’ll do the same thing, but use lettering instead of grass. The initials are an organic move forward, which the audience will have no idea of. The Greek man has bought both paintings, but he won’t know all this.

MV Unless he reads TANK.

RW Exactly.

MV I enjoy that there’s lots of eating in your pictures.

RW Food is often beautiful. Those grapes in the bowl on the table here are brought by Zwirner. When Sara from Zwirner comes, she says, “Here are some more grapes for your raisin bowl.” I’m turning them into raisins – you see the bottom lot, they’re dry. They become raisins and then I cook with them. You don’t have to do anything, you just have to leave them. A lot of work that people do is unnecessary. Let them be.

MV But did the omelette you painted get eaten?

RW Yes, it did. My husband didn’t like them at all runny. He went off eggs, but he would eat them if they were well-cooked. He didn’t like the Fortnum & Mason’s Scotch Eggs because they were runny in the middle. So the omelette is well cooked.

RW This is pure feminist painting. She tried to win the lawsuit from him. It’s the Duchess of Argyle. She was called the Dirty Duchess by the English public. Newspapers called her that, and they televised it. She doesn’t look like that. I worked it over and over and it came out looking like an Ingres, and I like Ingres so I left it.

RW Did you ask about breakfast?

MV Yes.

RW I’ve got so many drawings, there’s always something that connects. That’s the thing about being older and having a lot of time, you accumulate more stuff. Whatever the subject is, it can crop up. Flowers crop up, birds crop up. There was a time when I did a lot of devils, because I got interested in devils. Things that fly crop up. Some journalists wrote and said that the title “Doodlebug” crops up at least three times in the RA show. So food can crop up too. It’s very pretty, isn’t it?

MV Do you cook like you paint?

RW There’s a lot that’s similar. Cleaning the canvas is like housework; smoothing it out with paint is like icing a cake. You stick on a lot of paint, and you don’t like it lumpy, so you make it beautifully. It’s like making white sauce, too. You have to get the consistency right.

MV And then it curdles.

RW Certainly if it’s custard it does. I used to make custard with eggs, which is tricky because it curdles. I always made it with eggs, as my mother did. She never used Bird’s Custard.

I’ve done omelettes [The Well-Cooked Omelette, 1989]. I’ve done breakfast [Breakfast, 2020]. But the breakfast picture I probably told you was about climate change because it was a particularly hot summer. We were told not to use hose pipes, which I don’t ever do anyway – I always use a watering can. But there weren’t many blackberries or cherries, and the birds ate them. I think I put the date on the drawing. I wanted the date to position it, but it’s only obliquely about climate change. Because really it’s about lovely, dark, paint and the dish. I was wondering what to paint. I used to have breakfast on that little dish. It’s a Victorian dish, and it’s got little indentations down it. I think it might be to hold a gravy spoon. I used to have a breakfast of uncooked oatmeal and fruit, and cherry compote sometimes. But when I had my own cherries I used that instead. I was looking at it, wondering what to paint and thought I ought to paint it. And so I did, and I made it big. The background is brown, not black, even though it looks black.

MV Shall we look at the pictures in your Paris exhibition?

RW This is in Paris, but it was in the RA summer show [Ballet Backdrop, 2024]. Each of the square sections is six feet: that’s six feet six, 12 feet high and nearly 12 feet wide.

I’ve never been to a classical ballet. But Margot Fonteyn did several episodes on television. She showed a lot of 18th-century engravings, and they were pretty, but they didn’t really fit with the art of now. They were charming, and they were just washed with colour. I was quite taken with them, that’s why I used her series. The dancing figure in the bottom left section unfortunately got burnt to death because her frock caught alight from the stage candles. Her name was Little Emma, and she came to a very sad end. The point that Margot Fonteyn was making was that the colours were pastel. Bunches of flowers were delicate, everything was delicate certainly not abstract. But then everything got jazzy and more abstract in America at a certain point, and different sorts of shapes emerged. This painting I think has a snail-like composition like Matisse’s.

MV Where’s the Turkish mosaic from?

RW I don’t know, but anyone with a labelling type mind would tell you. I realised I had spelt Turkey wrong, and later I added the E in. The lettering in blue is the original writing from 2400 BCE, but it’s my writing along the bottom. The chair was added by me because it isn’t in the mosaic. It’s in Egyptian style, I like the umber dots. I thought they were striking. And also, if you’ve got dots you can sort of slide them sideways. And then, because Egyptians took the most particular view of, say, feet, which they showed from the side, not the front. Because the front was foreshortened and didn’t quite have the shape. I’ve done that with the chair: you’re looking at it from one direction, but you’re about to sit at it from a different direction. So it’s two views. It’s cubism.

MV Is this an ancient Egyptian or 19th-century chair?

RW It’s probably 19th-century. It’s called “Egyptian style”. But it’s got two viewpoints, which is what the Egyptians did. And to go with it, I’ve done lots of drawings. It started off looking a bit like Giacometti, or Bomberg or Auerbach, which I didn’t want, and it ended up with these nice parallel lines.

MV Where did you come across the chair?

RV On the web. I saw it, and I liked the dots.

MV They remind me of your grass painting and the gravel.

RW Well, yes, because the dots are also fairly formal. If you do them in a certain way, they start to look like Howard Hodgkin. If you do them in another way, they look like Damien Hirst. So the only way to do it is like a textile design, formally. But the parallel lines here were the final thing for the chairs to get them pure. It’s like a great big seven, and this could be the Minoan alphabet. I’m swanking new knowledge because I didn’t know until yesterday that there were some Minoan letters that looked like that. The seven is European. The umber and white dots reminded me of Fra Angelico. The figure on the right relates to Raphael’s School of Athens (1509–1511), with Plato pointing up and Aristotle pointing down.

RW This was from the same mosaic, but I spelt it right this time. But only just, you can see I’ve put the “E” in late. The “K” stuck out more, and so did the “Y”. I corrected it because I get these academics saying I can’t spell, and often I get a bit tired of them. A piece of board which I use to cut out the sun in my studio fell across the middle of the canvas and smudged the black. That’s why I put the mosaic around the skeleton.

MV You said you’re keen on chance.

RW You can accept chance or not. If you like it, then you can accept it. And as a theory, you can accept it, but you can also reject it. I didn’t like the smudge – it didn’t suit the painting, so I painted it out. In doing so, I had to repaint all this outside bit around here.

MV The skeleton looks like he is swooning.

RW Well, he’s happy, isn’t he? His children won’t find him difficult, I think. He’s pleasant, certainly friendly. And at his elbow is the head of Ronaldinho.

RW Here’s a traditional still life [A White Pedestal Dish, 2025]. They look like oranges, but in fact, they were my own homegrown apples in the garden, and they’ve gone yellow. I think I’ve kept them, and they were small because the tree is overhung with other trees. And that was a big Spanish plum and that’s a leaf. And they’re on a compotier, a pedestal dish. I love them, they add height to your dinner table. You put pudding or fruit in them. Whole runner beans look marvellous, hanging over.

MV Apples get that lovely waxy feel when they’ve been sitting for a while.

RW Yes, the skin goes waxy.

I painted it hanging across the corner of the studio. People ask why I don’t get a big studio. They say I’m not poor. But I don’t want to. I put a bit of board behind if I’ve got a very demanding face or something because it’s easier with something hard behind. This was painted in mid-air. It’s a still life, which also looks a bit like Pompeii. I love the Pompeii wall paintings. This sort of traditional stuff has been going on for a long time. Early mosaics depicted mice and fruit and jugs of wine and girls. This colour here was very beautiful. I’d run out of ochre, so I mixed strong spectrum yellow with white and then with burnt umber. And we got this.

MV Do you mix it on the canvas?

RW I mix it in a tin. I mixed up the two, but I ran out. It’s like cooking. You’re never quite sure how much white you put in before, or how much umber, or how much yellow. You get all these nice, rich changes, but if I’d had the yellow ochre, I wouldn’t have done this.. I scraped it off here at the bottom, and I didn’t think it was right. I put a whole lump of green at the bottom, a stripe to anchor it. And I didn’t like it lumpy, so I made it beautifully smooth.

RW If you think of skeletons, the gender disappears a bit, doesn’t it?

MV Unless you know exactly what you’re looking at, which I don’t.

RW Here, I made a woman because I made her pelvis bigger. They’ll be shown next to each other so people can compare. His ribs fly up, because it’s a male attribute to go out and find animals and do the transport at a wedding. You know, they’re more outgoing. Or used to be, traditionally – not so much now. So his ribs stick up and hers curl in, because she’s in the home looking after children. I don’t think that’s anatomically the case.

MV Which shape would your ribs be?

RW I dare say the same as yours. They’re protective, and enclosing. Like traditional mothers and homes. She’s slightly prettier than he is.

MV Do you feel like a traditional mother?

RW No, I’m always amazed that I’ve been a mum. I didn’t marry to have children. I married because I like the person I married. Children then arrived, and I’m glad I’ve got them.They’re terrific, and they’re funny. I’d call them good value.

MV Worth it in the end?

RW Certainly worth it. Painting is difficult. It looks easy, but it isn’t. It’s only when you get to the end that people say, “That looks easy,” but it wasn’t easy to get there. And it’s all-consuming, and that’s why it doesn’t work with children. Roy was painting, so I looked after the children. People ask me if I’m angry, but no. It turned out OK for me, but it often doesn’t. You get tired of parenting, and you try to come back to painting but you can’t because it’s out of step with your time or your age. You’ve left it, and you can’t get back into it. Privately, you can, but publicly you can’t. I tell myself that painting is a lot of luck.

MV You make your own luck.

RW People say it’s just luck. At the moment, women are being dug out and celebrated. But I don’t think it’s because of that.

MV Your own success?

RW Yes, I think my success is because of the painting. But it’s also because if you leave it late, you’ve got a lot of experience. Things turn up. I’ve got a lot of connections to all sorts of subjects, without me consciously doing it.

MV I have a pet theory that to be creative, you need to treat yourself like a compost bucket, and you have to put lots of good bits in.

RW You have to keep pushing stuff in if you’ve been looking after children. I wasn’t removed entirely because I was going to exhibitions, buying books for libraries, for art, for further education, and teaching and doing history. So I was filling my compost bucket, but I wasn’t doing painting, and turning that stuff into a painting is very different.

MV How did you then get back into making work yourself?

RW I was teaching in a further education college and doing a painting course, and it closed down. There had been a baby boom or something, there was a historic reason. The college just phased out, and we were advised to go do something else. So I applied to the Royal College of Art, and when I came out I just started painting like a fiend. That was lucky, too, because people say, “Well, you can’t just apply to the Royal College of Art and think you’re going to get in.”

MV Tell me about Homage to Henri, Bette and Bear [2026].

RW I’m a fan of Henri Rousseau, or Douanier, whatever you want to call him. He is being resurrected at the moment. People are saying he’s a good painter, and that was not always the case. I’ve always thought he was a great painter so I returned to his work. I found a painting called Unpleasant Surprise (1899–1901). It had this dark red background and a big brown bear at the front, and it has a figure here on the right. Luckily, I’ve got her in a pinafore frock. I put Bette Davis here. I think Bette Davis has a terrific mouth and eyes. And she’s not a cheapskate, she’s serious. So instead of Rousseau’s nude, I put Bette Davis. I’ve kept a wolf in the front. Rousseau has a tree, and he has a huntsman who shoots a gun.

MV There’s often a touch of glamour in a lot of your painting.

RW I have no objection to glamour. I know it doesn’t go with serious painting. As a student, glamour was not something that you considered. It was painting like Cézanne. You kill yourself, you wear old clothes, you don’t have glamour. Cézanne didn’t have glamour.

MV I loved that in the painting with all the hands, in the RA show, even the shadow hand had its diamond ring on.

RW They all had diamonds. This is one in the eye for your friend who says hers is bigger than yours, so I made it bigger. There’s nothing to stop you making it enormous, creating more glamour. The left eye, as we’re looking at it, is a bit like a fried egg because the white of it curls, or frizzles. You know, when you pour an egg into hot olive oil to fry it, it frizzles up. So I left it as a metaphor. It took me a long time to do her eyes. First of all, they were black in the middle, and then they were brown, and then they were black again. Anyway, finally, I got very fed up and thought, this isn’t a joke, I’m going to bed. And I thought, I’ll do one more go and I gave her blue eyes. And funnily enough the white, frizzly bit of egg, finally just did it. Then I looked up what colour her eyes were. Do you know what colour Bette Davis’s eyes were?

MV There’s a song all about them. But I don’t know what colour.

RW They were blue, but I didn’t know the song. And the blue came after black and brown and grey and black again. Then someone sent me the lyrics to “Bette Davis Eyes”. The bear is quite like the Rousseau bear. I liked his claws. He’s also got five fingers. I didn’t know bears had five fingers, because cats have four. They say he’s primitive, they say he can’t draw. He’s got it right. Then I looked up medieval bears because I quite often like to see an alternative thing. I didn’t want to just stick with the Rousseau. The reason for doing it was the dark background and the bear, which I liked, not the woman. I looked up medieval bears on the web, and there are lots of images of medieval bears, and they have a lot of fingers, and they have big claws, and some of them had wings, which I thought was marvellous. But I found that Rousseau’s bear was actually quite like a medieval bear. That’s why people say he’s no good, because it’s not the same as a High Renaissance bear. So I thought, I’ll stick with Rousseau’s.

MV Exit, followed by a bear.

RW This is Nebuchadnezzar. In the Old Testament it says that Nebuchadnezzar went to sleep and he had a dream about a huge man at the bottom of his bed. If you paint a huge man you’ve got to have something to show scale. So I put Nebuchadnezzar down at the bottom in his bed. He’s having the dream, which then shows the size of the huge figure. It’s a simple, ordinary, well-dressed, well-played-out device. I liked the power of the black. He’s got feet of clay, that’s where the saying comes from. I think Nebuchadnezzar falls apart. I think he’s overtaken by the Medes, or the Phoenicians. Whoever it was, he was in danger.

RW This is a work on paper, the view from my studio window. This is a rose growing up. Because I don’t cut the roses they’ve all gone wild, and they grow right up onto the roof. So that’s an example of my philosophy taking over.

MV Your philosophy: let nature do its thing?

RW Let it be and don’t contribute too much. So you get little wild roses growing all over, which is immensely pretty. I’m very fond of wild roses. I prefer them to cultivated ones. A lot of people don’t. I think people are changing on that. They’re changing with me, but that’s because they think I’ve got more status. Before that they just thought the garden was a tip. Now it’s different, because my paintings cost a certain amount. I think that’s how it’s gone, which is very funny.

MV You’re right on trend for rewilding. You’re a rewilding pioneer.