This is how Rose Wylie paints the sun. She does a big yellow circle. Then she adds straight yellow lines around it. Underneath she does a couple of palm trees that are brown sticks with dollops of green on top. On the sea, she adds an outline of a ship with black smoke puffing out of it.
The teacher gave her a gold star and pinned it on the classroom wall. His name is Mr Hans-Ulrich Obrist and the nursery is called the Serpentine Sackler Gallery. The exhibition is called Quack Quack. Oh, and young Rose is 83.
It took me a while to come back to the palm trees in her painting Cuban Scene, Smoke (2016) and compare them with the Californian palms David Hockney paints. Hockney’s palms are more precise, but do they really say more about the essence of a palm than Wylie’s bursts of broad-brushed leaves? Painting is a wonderful, magic thing. That is why young children love doing it. Wylie has rediscovered in maturity the freedom with which we painted when we were kids. Make a dog. Make a duck. Make a V1 flying bomb.