photography & portfolio by Juergen Teller
creative partnership by Dovile Drizyte
interview by Jennifer Higgie
postproduction by Lucas Rios Palazesi at Quickfix
Art and life are as inextricably linked as inhaling and exhaling for British figurative painter Rose Wylie. Her cottage studio in the English countryside is evidence of her prodigious output. Newspapers, magazines, brushes, sketches—the flotsam and jetsam of a creative life, mirror the frenetic energy of her large-scale, unprimed canvases that are rife with references from Hollywood movies, art history, lost civilizations, and her own domestic environs. At almost ninety years old, Wylie is more prolific than ever. On the occasion of her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, CLOSE, not too close, at David Zwirner, novelist and art critic Jennifer Higgie explores the hidden archetypes and symbolism of her paintings; and Juergen Teller visits her studio in Kent for a picnic lunch and a document of portraits.
JENNIFER HIGGIE How are you, generally?
ROSE WYLIE Painting most of the time.
HIGGIE I can see that from these amazing paintings. It's extraordinary.
WYLIE I can stand up. I can move around okay. No, I'm fine. I’m in my ninetieth year.
HIGGIE I'd love to start with your show in Los Angeles, CLOSE, Not Too Close. It's such an intriguing title. How did that come about?
WYLIE It comes from 17th-century poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge doesn't go for wax works; he doesn't like copies. He doesn't think art should be a copy. It is about finding the likeness in the unlikeness. What I often do is make a list of characteristics: age, type of hair, type of physical makeup and additions, tall, wide, big shoulders, huge hips, tiny ankles, all these sorts of things. That's what CLOSE, Not Too Close, refers to: it's close to the image that you're looking at, but it's not too close, a lateral slant, but connected. This title suits me perfectly. I don't want it too close because I think art has to go through a process of transformation.
HIGGIE It makes sense to me that there are, say, portraits or resemblances that aren't necessarily about the actual way something looks. It's about how something feels or the resonances.
WYLIE Exactly. It's how it feels, how it smells, how you sense it. It's all those things. It's putting all this stuff together, which is what Matisse called the ‘synthesis,’ rather than the ‘analysis.’
HIGGIE Do you believe in the idea of the spiritual in its broader sense, like the idea that objects or people have a spiritual dimension or a dimension of some other reality?
WYLIE I do, but I'd call it mood, or quality, or transcendence. A shift into something outside the subject or the painting. But it's mostly about appearances, how the painting looks. That's what our business is about.
HIGGIE Considering it's your first major exhibition in Los Angeles, and I know you've long been interested in the movies and movie stars, was it an extra dimension for you that this show was in LA? And did knowing that they would be in LA shape some of the paintings that you were making?
WYLIE Well, it did interest me, but it didn't shape anything. I do paint from films. It's one of my genres. I love films, and I've done a lot of paintings based on film. I didn't do anything in the show specifically for LA. I think often if you do that, it doesn't actually come out too well. Maybe for some artists it does, because it's an impetus; it tricks them into something new, but sometimes you go into it and it just doesn't work.
HIGGIE Have you ever been to LA, just out of interest?
WYLIE No. But I love Mexico, so it's sort of going down in that direction.
HIGGIE And maybe it's good not to go to LA in a sense, because Hollywood is such an idea of a place, rather than an actuality sometimes.
WYLIE No, it could be a good thing not to go. Some writers, when they write, they research and go everywhere. Other writers deliberately don't. I mean, it's a way of working, isn't it?
HIGGIE Do you feel that, in some ways, all of your paintings are a kind of self-portrait, even when you're not painting an image of yourself?
WYLIE They are and they aren't. This particular show is a kind of self-portrait. Without actually painting myself. If you say that the subject I choose and the way I paint is a self-portrait, then it's all a self-portrait.
HIGGIE But maybe it could be said that these are portraits of your life, that it's a friend's Sunday garden, or things that you have in your home, or films that you've watched. And humor has always been important to you. I really love your painting, Lying In The Sun (2022), with “cautionary tale” written across the top. Is it a cautionary tale because she's naked or because she's getting sunburned?
WYLIE If you lie in the sun too much, you can get moles later, and moles are often cancerous. So in fact, it's a suggestion that to lie in the sun and fry is not a good idea. And then, top right in that picture is a fire department sprinkler boat. It is funny. She's on fire. She's burning. She's roasting. It's almost medieval, and yet, it's not medieval at all. It’s transtemporal.
HIGGIE What do you mean by transtemporal?
WYLIE Well, I mean it could turn up in the history of painting at any time. It could be medieval. It could be well before medieval: early wall painting, before Christ, or Pompeii. People have always painted objects, girls, women, clothes. I think the painting I do fits something which crosses time.
HIGGIE That was really noticeable in this group of pictures. I thought that time moved very swiftly around. I was looking at Wing Tips and Blue Doodlebug (2022), which I think are references to your memories from World War II. And then Spindle and Cover Girl (2022), which has “Observer Magazine” written across the top, and also “Assyrian hair.” You're moving around thousands of years.
WYLIE It’s using what you've got. Often artists think, What shall I paint? If you do a lot of drawing and ideas, there’s often something you can just use. If you look back at what you’ve done, something turns up. So that's how “Assyrian hair” came up. The sarcophagus eye came up. Those pink plants, the spindle from the hedges, I just put them together.
HIGGIE And when you said they came up, where did “Assyrian hair” come up? (laughs)
WYLIE (laughs) I watch television programs that deal with Mari Art, that deal with history and Easter Island, Syrian, Babylonian. I like ancient art.
HIGGIE What is it you like about it?
\WYLIE I mean, it's often isolated. It's not hugely detailed or textured. It's not flashy and arty. If you just look at ancient art, it's often not terribly realistic. Sometimes it is. But the way it's realistic is somehow not quite photographic, it’s universal. It’s close, but not too close.
HIGGIE In our 21st-century world, we're bombarded with images all the time. But you can look at very ancient images, and surprisingly, they seem very fresh. It's like we haven't seen the world or a body represented like that before.
WYLIE It can be exciting and, well, intensely compelling. But there are so many contemporary artists I like as well.
HIGGIE Who are the contemporary artists that you like?
WYLIE Well, there's Alida Cervantes. She does very fresh painting. And Tschabalala Self I have a particular affection for. She's young and she's very fresh and very vigorous, but also there's a pleasant splash of vulgarity. But it's not hideous. It's vulgar ... nice, but it's not cheap. I don't mind cheap when it's the right kind of it. Jonathan Meese I've liked, and he's very gestural. But I think I'm off gestural at the moment.
HIGGIE Why is that?
WYLIE I tire of it. I prefer other images. I like Giorgio de Chirico and El Greco. I mean, there's no gesture in sight in de Chirico. El Greco or Giovani di Paulo. Today, if a painting is too gestural, I get rid of it. That's just how I work, because you work through ideas and faces in your painting life, and you just keep moving on
HIGGIE So has that been quite a recent shift in your work, this move against the gestural?
WYLIE It's been coming up, but probably I’ll be back on it tomorrow. I do both … I like two apparently contrary things going on together.
HIGGIE In terms of how you go about making your paintings, at the moment, are you doing many preliminary drawings, or do you just go in there and work instinctively?
WYLIE I do a lot of drawings, pick one and work from it, then put it down, and think I should have started with another, and then I use another, and then I go back to the first one. It's all flexible and fluid. There's no real fixed rule for it. But I often have a drawing because that's where all the decision-making is, you can do a lot of getting the image into something which you can bear to look at. And then, the painting goes on from the one you like the look of most, or the one that you think will translate better, and then the other decisions begin.
HIGGIE Is there a lot of slippage between the preparatory drawings you do and the final painting? Do you change things a lot when you're making the painting?
WYLIE There isn't. Sometimes it's very close, and I want to get it close. And if it's not close, I go on with it. Other times, I just let it go.
HIGGIE Would you describe yourself as a very instinctive painter?
WYLIE I think both. Both instinctive and—what would be the opposite of instinctive?
HIGGIE I think it might have been Caspar David Friedrich who had his palette in one room and the easel in the next room so that he could never make an instinctive gesture. He had to move slowly between the two rooms, so every gesture would be very considered. Maybe very considered is the opposite of instinctive.
WYLIE I do both, instinctive and considered. I'm a hybrid. I'm a combination of any kind of attitude that you can dredge up. I mean, the painting My House Front, and Back (2022)—I took nine hours drawing the blackberry leaf. I had the leaf in front of me and I just kept thinking, That's cheap. It's horrible. I can't bear it. I don't want to look at it. That's no good. It's not good enough. For hours, I kept changing it. And then finally, I did the painting quite close to the drawing because such a lot of decision-making had gone into the drawing that there was nothing more for me to do, and why not use it?
HIGGIE How long would you spend on most of your large paintings do you think?
WYLIE Sometimes I work obsessively for two, three days, you know really, just all the time because no one is here to stop me. And then, I leave it for a bit, just simply because I've got somewhere, and then I come back to it and if I don't like it, I change it again. So, I would always leave a painting for at least two weeks, and then come back to it, perhaps, and change it. Occasionally, you can do one in two days, but not often. Very, very rarely.
HIGGIE Do you abandon many paintings?
WYLIE I usually go on with them. I don't like wasting the paint and the time, so I push on. I just change it, scrape it all off, and put more paint on.
HIGGIE And at what point do the titles come in? Do you begin with a title, or do you come up with a title once you've finished?
WYLIE It gets an affectionate nickname, and I sometimes stick with that. One of the paintings in the show, I nicknamed Tarantino's Sister. Really, though, it was a bit too close to Hollywood. If you look at the heads, the middle head looks a bit like Tarantino. But because it's a girl, I called it Tarantino's Sister. Now it’s called Up the Bikers.
HIGGIE Where did that title come from?
WYLIE I live in a village, and up the road, there's a lot of spare land. The Prince, now King of Wales, bought a plot of land and gave it over to ex-army people who had motorbikes. It was a kind of rally-point. Motorbikes stream past the window and they can use this plot of land for racing.
HIGGIE So, you don't mind the bikers going past the window?
WYLIE No, I don't mind them at all. It's life. It's noise. It's only sometimes—four times a year or something. No, I don't mind the noise coming in. The bikers and the noise and the traffic—I like it. It's the opposite of death. My studio is generally thought to be a bit messy, but it's the opposite of sterile, and hospitals.
HIGGIE It's life. And there's almost a feeling in that painting of a slippage with time. They look like Easter Island heads or something. They feel very ancient in that picture.
WYLIE Well, I hope so. I like Easter Island heads. And they're also quite current because I think the hairstyles are current.
HIGGIE Do you ever make paintings which please you, but you don't fully understand what each component is? One of the many things I love about painting is that however full of resemblance it might be, painting is still enigmatic. The meaning is often enigmatic even to the painter.
WYLIE It can keep on accruing, can't it? It can get more and more.
HIGGIE How important, or not, is it for you that people looking at your paintings understand the references? Or can they take away their own new meanings from them?
WYLIE It doesn't matter at all. I think it can be enriching for the audience if they do see, or interpret it in some sort of way, but it need not necessarily be what I intend. I think it should be open. But it's quite nice if they've seen films, like For A Few Dollars More (1965) or Blazing Saddles (1974). I think it can help.
HIGGIE I'd love to hear more about your thoughts on color, because I remember you telling me once actually, in that piece that you wrote for Thin Skin, the exhibition I curated, you talked about your love of yellow and green. I'd love your thoughts on that.
WYLIE I love yellow and green. I had a bed for my daughter, Henrietta. I painted it green. It was metal. It had yellow flowers on it and was early Victorian. But while I do like yellow and green, I also like pink and black. I like black and brown. I love pink, but I think color depends on how much and how it's used.
HIGGIE I'm sure there are artists who you particularly admire for their use of color.
WYLIE Manet and El Greco, something about the black keeps it all together. But then, I don't necessarily like to have too much black. Matisse is good at color, but then so is Picasso, and look at Ugo Rondinone or Franz West.
HIGGIE We've obviously talked a lot about extraordinary painters, but I'd love to hear a little bit more about your thoughts on caricature and cartoons, which I know that you've spoken about before.
WYLIE I'm not so interested in caricature, it’s too distorted. What I do is transform and extend. And the thing about cartoon language is that it has to be immediately recognizable or the cartoon has no point. If you're painting something like a brick or an ice cream, it's quite useful if people can see what you're doing. I do like predellas and little paintings at the bottom of big paintings which show movement—they link into cartoons in a way that I can completely accept. Cartoons are a move away from reality, which I also like. And the cartoon language is actually very useful if you grab hold of it and channel it. Sometimes I get accused of being too cartoon-like. And from my point of view, they're not cartoon-like at all. I'm simply using everything at my disposal. For instance, if you paint a hot dog, you paint the lines of heat. I use cartoon language, but I also use Renaissance devices of foreshortening and cross-hatching. I put it all in, mix it up. I think distortion can go too far, and that's perhaps more to do with the comical or the tiresome. Exaggeration, I don't actually go for that either. I go for poetic transformation.
