When Found becomes Given: Rose Wylie’s new paintings

Time, in Rose Wylie’s paintings, is unstable; it’s stacked up, moves sideways, swerves. Memories from last week or last century are evoked in bold images that rub up against diaristic lines of text or single words which float amid compositions as enigmatic as the moon. Like visions conjured in a reverie, hierarchies have no value here; the startling colour of a flower or a dress is rendered with as much tenderness as a scene from a film, an opera singer, and a teapot; the angle of stars or a curve of a bird’s wing; plums in a bowl, the possibilities of grass. There is, however, one constant: when Wylie represents women, they’re powerful, enigmatic, and vital.

I visit the artist at her home in Kent. As we walk up the narrow staircase to her studio, Wylie tells me she sometimes like to use what she calls ‘bad brushes’, by which she means worn-down brushes. To explain this further, she refers to her painting Philip and Mary (2025), ‘where the black background is scrubbed and pushed in, until it’s matte, like soot. The primrose yellow of the right-hand canvas is streaked across, fresh on the surface with a wide new brush. The two canvases work together; the black throws up the primrose yellow, and the primrose yellow makes the black blacker.’

She is, she explains, attracted to an ‘element of the unexpected’ in both her compositions and her mark making, especially ‘if a line separates and there is a long very thin gap down the middle’. She pauses. ‘It’s something you can’t get with good brushes because they’re so perfect.’ I ask her about her exhibition’s title, When Found becomes Given. She says it’s a question without an answer: at what point does something an artist has created, or found, enter the canon, become a ‘given’?

The world Wylie represents is not neat; in this, her paintings embody something very human. Although her pictures suggest stories, she is uninterested in narrative, saying that she’s ‘not telling a story’, she’s ‘making a picture’. She is fascinated by the creative potential of mistakes. ‘I make them all the time,’ she says. ‘I love crossing things out because it shows you an earlier thought. And one that you decide not to use. It shows decision making and discrimination and thinking.’ Looking around her studio, she observes, ‘I think you need to channel your attitude.’ I take this to mean that an artist cannot be too scrupulous; if an element of a picture, however wonderful, isn’t working, then it has to go. An artist must mine the parts of their psyche that are not well behaved.

Wylie’s approach to picture making is a way of navigating, or sorting, the cascade of images and ideas, information and feelings that confront us most days, from the general to the intimate. She has reimagined a vast cast of people from history, film, and her immediate family: recent paintings include characters from Quentin Tarantino’s film Django Unchained and her granddaughter, also named Rose, long and slender in a brown coat and red shoes, next to Mary Queen of Scots and Phillip of Spain in a darkened room with a small dog. She’s portrayed Helen of Troy and Adam’s first wife, Lilith, who was banished from the Garden of Eden for speaking her own mind, next to a man in a loose, green Gucci suit, his head cut off by the top of the painting. The artist is fascinated by the power of clothes to reveal personality: she pictures Nebuchadnezzar II, the longest-reigning king of the Babylonian dynasty, small at the bottom of the painting, to give monumentality to the dream figure above him, who is dressed in a suit with square shoulders and a head like a block of wood. (Wylie says, ‘I like shoulders.’)

Wylie’s method is one of rhythmic, energetic working, scraping and pushing and pulling paint in all directions; staining, striking out, and smoothing, constantly playing with the possibilities of colour, line and surface. Surprisingly, given the boldness of her work, the artist admits to occasional feelings of inadequacy. One recent painting, A Dream (2024), was inspired by a dream in which she saw herself as a tiny, naked creature, like a stick insect with breasts, cleaning her hall floor. She painted each brick separately, in four different colours. ‘You can see’, she says, ‘that the scrubbing brush is not adequate to the job, and she has no water or soap.’ I say, ‘It’s odd you don’t call that a nightmare.’ She replies: ‘But it wasn’t frightening. I’m used to it. It’s a familiar feeling.’

In one of her most diaristic paintings, Dinner Outside (2024), Wylie evokes a magical summer gathering with neighbours beneath the stars. Against a pale ochre ground, the grass is rendered in groupings of three moss-green lines (which she describes as ‘a given’, in that it’s a known way of representing grass), and the gravel in brown dots (which she describes as ‘a found’, in that it’s her innovation). A blunt, looping script indicates the darkening sky, the date – August 10 2024 – the distant trees, and the table, small, bright, and yellow. Two women in coats gaze up at an urn, their wonder, in a few swift, soft lines, as clear as a bell. Wylie wrote that the painting reminds her ‘of a map, or a report from a 17th-century discovery-ship, where the resident-artist has recorded (for the home audience) the transport, habits, homes and dress of some newly found “peoples” – only here, it’s now, and I am the “people.”’