At 88, Rose Wylie still cherishes the idea that to be an artist is to defy convention. Take her studio, on the upper floor of her cottage in Kent, a couple of hours from London, where she’s lived for 53 years. The floor is covered in old, screwed-up newspapers, which she uses to clean her brushes. There’s a huge mound of discarded furniture and paint tins halfway down one side of the room. Wonky cabinet shelves groan with detritus, including the box that housed an Easter egg Wylie once painted.
“It’s source material,” the artist says in a cut-glass English accent as she sips a cup of tea. “I don’t want to be caught up in the idea that you must tidy up, which is what you get as a child: ‘Clear the cupboard, clean your paintbox, your drawers are a mess.’ When my paint tin is empty, I just throw it on the pile. Sometimes, if you have a very clean, sterile working situation, it takes time to keep it like that, and when you come in you don’t start messing it up. For me, the paints are already out. I can come in and just start working.” This mainly happens at night—the day is taken up with a great deal of procrastination. At around 11:30 PM, Wylie will head to the studio. “Time passes and it’s suddenly 3:30 AM,” she says. “But I get up late.” The day I visit, there are three vast paintings on unprimed and unmounted canvas, which she has made for her forthcoming show at David Zwirner’s Los Angeles gallery, which opens in September. One has a bright green background and a pink pedestal with a Battenberg cake and a slice of ginger cake on it. On the left is a menacing black shape that turns out to be another, lumpier table. The actual cakes Wylie painted are on a plate on the floor, amid the discarded newspapers—she decided to eliminate the plate after contemplating the picture for a few days, worried that it was “irritating and fiddly, too much narrative, not right. And now it’s hugely better.”