lot has changed for Rose Wylie since Germaine Greer first praised her vast and blissfully unruly paintings in the Guardian seven years ago. Then the late-blooming artist was a new discovery and her unsold, unstretched canvases were stacked from floor to ceiling in the 17th-century Kent cottage that’s been her home for 50 years. When I arrange to meet her there, just before her new solo show opens at the Serpentine Sackler this month, I worry that there won’t be anything to see.
Over leftover birthday cake – Wylie has just turned 83 – she says that when it comes to the day-to-day business of creating drawings and paintings, little has altered. “I have the same carpenter making the stretchers. I put the glue on myself and cut the canvas. Everything is the same. They just used to pile up. Now they don’t.”
Paintings have recently gone to art fairs in France and Shanghai. What she’s currently working on in her studio, a converted bedroom upstairs, is destined for an exhibition next spring with the blue-chip American dealer David Zwirner. Waiting to be shipped out, in a shed abutting the kitchen, her new commissions for Quack Quack, as the new Serpentine show is called, draw on memories from her time in Kensington as a child during the blitz, as well as observations of the park’s present-day visitors – a mix of fighter planes, cavorting dogs and resting migrants. Pinned on the side of a bookshelf in the dining room is a list of older works for the show, their titles describing the everyday, accessible subjects she loves, from olive oil labels to Choco Leibniz biscuits, from Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill to Arsenal and Spurs.