Rose Wylie Interviewed in Harper's Bazaar

The outside of the house where Rose Wylie has lived and worked since arriving with her late husband, the painter Roy Oxlade, in 1968, is pleasingly deceptive: it looks like all the other tidy 17th-century red-brick terraces that line a quiet Kent village’s main street.Upon entering, it strikes me quite quickly that this is a bricks-and-mortar embodiment of the artist’s finest traits: pragmatism, extreme creativity, catholic tastes and a disregard for snobbery. The home of someone with a fondness for the naff and a certain fluency in French philosophy, where on the shelves, Jean-Michel Basquiat documentary and Saturday Night Fever videos are stacked together, while Voltaire, Philip Roth, Gabriel García Márquez and Lewis Carroll perch next to anatomy encyclopaedias and a hardback enticingly titled The Revenge of the Philistines. A daddy longlegs amicably dangles over a postcard from Jonathan Anderson (Wylie took part in the SS25 Loewe campaign) taped to a picture frame, below which sits a box of gory theatrical accessories – bloody dismembered fingers, rolling eyeballs et al.

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