Aspen Art Museum

In advance of Rose Wylie: Quack Quack, Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London (November 30, 2017–February 11, 2018)

Date: November 16, 2017

Location: Rose Wylie’s studio, Sittingbourne, Kent, UK

Early Beginnings and Recognition
HUO: What was the first museum your parents took you to? What’s your first museum memory?

RW: The first one was in about 1948, soon after the end of the war. My mother took me to the Prado Museum in Madrid. On the way home on the train up through France, we stopped in Paris and went to the Louvre. I found the museums all intensely boring—I had no intrigue. They were just big Bible pictures as far as I was concerned.

HUO: Your mother was into Greek mythology. Was that important to you?

RW: She liked mythology, history, and she loved music. That was about what she was. While she read, I used to paint books on Greek mythology—I would fill them in with colors using tins of Winsor & Newton paints.

HUO: You went to art school in 1956, and I was wondering how that decision came to you. You had other options: you might have looked into studying law; you also wanted to be a dancer; lots of things. Was there a sudden awakening, or was it more of a gradual process?

RW: Maybe an actress, I thought. The trouble with that was performance—I’m not good at it. The thing about painting is, your performance is by yourself. You are in a room by yourself; there’s no audience, and that’s what I like.

I’d always drawn and painted. It was not about memory, funnily enough, as it is if you study law. You’ve got to have a certain memory, and I was born with a rather weedy memory (I can’t remember names). I can manage OK, but I’m not good at learning lines or performing in law courts. Painting suited me terribly well, and I loved it.

HUO: It seems that drawing played a role before you came to painting. I found this text of yours where you talk about drawing in early childhood. You were always taught not to rub out your drawings in school, and that’s why you got into doing that.

RW: It was just the thing that we were told. In order to be free, the artist didn’t rub out. But actually, I love rubbing out a lot; I rub out and cover up all the time. If you’re told not to do something, you do it. It is like the cat—if you shut the door and don’t let the cat in, that’s where the cat wants to go.

HUO: Rainer Maria Rilke wrote this little book, which is advice to a young poet. What was the best advice you were given as a young artist?

RW: Just do what you do and keep going, without being put off by hostility or contrary opinions, or any opinions, really. Advice is always problematic because people often go the other way, so it’s best not to advise too much.

HUO: Would you have any advice for a young artist today?

RW: Well, I’m not sure. Just keep with it. I don’t think advice necessarily helps anyone.

HUO: I wanted to talk about the beginnings of your career. Which work would you say is the number one piece in your catalogue raisonné that marks the beginning of your oeuvre and is no longer a student work?

RW: Well, I suppose if you mean the beginning of when my work received a certain amount of visibility, it would be the Room Project [at Trinity Theatre, Royal Tunbridge Wells, England] with the four Twink paintings [2004]: yellow, green, blue, and red [Fig. 1]. Then I entered the paintings into East International at Norwich Gallery [England]—Neo Rauch and Gerd Harry Lybke selected the group, and the paintings were put into one room. That’s where Jari Lager saw them and invited me to join his gallery, which I did. Really, that was the beginning of my visibility. Before then, I was painting and just piling them up on the floor on top of each other.

HUO: Whenever we visit the studio, you have amazing new paintings. There is this very new painting—a yellow rough piece that you’re working on. And there are always drawings around the studio that seem to be a point of departure from your paintings. Can you tell us about the current role of drawings in your work?

RW: With drawing, you can do it anywhere. You can do it before going to bed or off the computer. It’s more economic; it’s simpler to carry around; it’s small. It isn’t a mess like painting. Painting is a physical mess. Also, it’s very immediate, and I’ve always got pencils.

Pencils are cheap and easily available, so I do a lot of drawings. If I see something I like the look of, I make a drawing of it. For instance, the other day, tooling through the computer, I saw a wonderful painting by either Peter Doig or Chris Ofili—I didn’t know which one did it, or if someone else did it; I didn’t know anything about it (it was in an article and the article didn’t explain who made it). But I made a note of the painting because I liked it. I did several drawings based on it, and I’m very happy with them.

Source Material
HUO: Your sources can be very diverse. Sometimes it’s art history, sometimes it’s cinema, or it can be your daily observations. It can be very quotidian things. Sometimes it’s the news or celebrities. Can you tell us about the sources and if you keep an archive of them?

RW: I’ve got a bulging file drawer of sources, and they’re all over the place. So yes, I do that but not always. Sometimes it’s only fleeting, like the person on the underground or sitting opposite me on the train. Sometimes I don’t have the source, but I’ve got the memory.

HUO: Then, of course, there is the translation from the drawing to the painting. In one extraordinary drawing, there’s a very small, spare space covered with newspaper. Behind it is the drawing that led to a new painting. Then there is a huge pile of newspapers and color on the studio floor, creating quite a chaotic mountain [Fig. 2]. Can you tell us about the process? As we are sitting in the middle of it, it’s the perfect place to discuss it!

RW: My husband didn’t really like paint all over the house, so I put paper on the floors to keep some sort of cover on them. If anyone comes, I put new newspaper down. Then I can use the new newspaper to wipe my brush and wipe the painting. If you’re working with wet paint and don’t want one color to pick up another, you’ve got to wipe the brush each time. I wipe it and throw the paper over there, and I get a great sense of exhilaration of not caring where I’ve thrown it. The newspaper just moves from being one thing to another—floor covering, to use, to wipe, to put the paint on, to wipe my brush, or just stack up.

HUO: This is also interesting because the newspapers, of course, have images and text. Then looking at your paintings, there is always handwriting. I was wondering about the connection to language, and how the text comes in.

RW: I like writing. I like the look of writing, particularly writing that I don’t know, like Arabic. It’s also easy to do. It’s easier to do a “g” than it is to do a face. A face is horrifically difficult because it goes so wrong. A “g” is not as difficult, but I like to do it backward. I go backward with my “g” so it doesn’t come out too facile and to give a new sense of it. It unites the painting.

HUO: It’s a great sentence: “It’s easier to make a ‘g’ than a face.”

RW: It is, and a number is easier, too.

HUO: You talked about the different sources for the images. What are the sources for the texts in your paintings? Do you quote?

RW: They’re often in the drawing. They can remind me of the director of a film or be a mnemonic device. As I said earlier, my memory is not symmetrical. If I write down the director of a film, I tend to remember it.

Also, if I look at my own pictures from time to time, it becomes my experience. It’s not just my memory, it becomes experience, too. It becomes what I do. With text, it unites the picture. It’s easier, and I like it.

HUO: You’re sitting here in the middle of a work-in-progress, which made me think about when you decide a painting is finished. Can you tell us about that?

RW: I can’t tell you. I’m not ever sure when it’s finished. I think it’s when it stops irritating me. I look at it and think, I can’t stick to the way that it is; it’s too elegant; it’s wrong; I don’t like it. Then I come in and change it. When I stop doing that, I don’t end it, I just leave it. I stop doing it, which equals ending it.

HUO: You also said that you liked this idea that paintings are always about making decisions. It’s nonstop decision-making.

RW: I did say that, but in a sense, I hate decisions. I don’t know why I’m doing an activity that demands decisions all the time. Painting is all about decisions, minutely, all the time.

HUO: Gerhard Richter said, “Painting is the highest form of hope.” Do you have a definition of painting?

RW: It’s exciting and very taxing. It drives me around the bend. It’s this contrast between the bother of beginning—a huge not-knowing about where you are with it—then suddenly, you’ve done it, you can look at it, and then you’ve left it. I don’t know if that’s hope. It’s just something done.

HUO: Beautiful. Then there is, of course, the aspect of theory. For example, the four paintings [the Twink pieces] are a series, and you very often work in series. There is not only repetition, but there is also difference.

RW: Yes. I go on until I can stick it, and I know there’s an alternative. With each decision, I could have done something else, and I think, I could have done that. So I go back and do a more challenging idea. I push it along, and it may or may not be something that spreads and umbrellas out. Often there are several finished or “ended” paintings around one beginning. There are two on the wall that are details of one on the floor and one on the wall behind. I’m going to do that one again because I would like to try something else with it, so that will be part of the series. It will go on like that.

HUO: It’s almost like zooming in.

RW: It is, into a subject. I keep expanding. I look at them and think, which one do I like best? Actually, I’m not quite sure half the time whether the one that I rejected earlier is the one that I like more now.

HUO: Douglas Gordon once famously said, “Cinema is dead. Raise the dead.” Obviously, the same is true for painting. In a way, painting has been declared dead so many times, but it’s totally alive. You’re a big fan of films, and you often depict images based on films by Almodóvar or Tarantino. Can you tell us about your film notes and how you use film and translate the narrative of the film into the narrative of the painting?

RW: Everyone says doing that wrecks the film because when I’m looking at it, it becomes source material. The narrative that you’ve referred to is always the visual image. It’s the sudden image of the film that’s just wonderful and so memorable. This was how it started because I began to question the word “memorable.” I didn’t question it until I tried to draw the memory. Then I found that I didn’t actually remember it very well at all.

I used to try to put the excitement of the image from the film into the drawing. I did that a lot. Also, it helped me to remember the film. It was respectful of the filmmaker, which I like because it’s another art form. The translation from one art form to another is an interesting idea. Transposition—we’ve all done it. But if you do it from a different art form, I recently heard that it’s called “ekphrasis.” It sounds like a fancy, smart word, but it’s respectful of film. I love images, and film is images. I try to make an equivalent image with a measure of the same excitement that I felt when I saw the original. It could just fall short and turn into something completely different, but I make drawings and then turn them into paintings.

HUO: Then, of course, there is also a cinematographic aspect in the way you often revise the image by splicing or cutting it. That, of course, makes me think of montage in cinema.

RW: I do that. It connects. But in fact, I cut because there’s something to be added or something that I didn’t like—cut the image; replace it; add to it. All of that splicing, in fact, comes from the necessity to get something that I can bear to look at into the work. It is not from the technique of film, but then I find that it meshes. I can find that it’s a trigger for going on, which is why I did long shots and close-ups. I thought it was slightly ridiculous to try to paint a long shot and then paint the same thing close up. It’s not economic in terms of how long it takes to make the painting again. For a camera, it is economic.

It’s subversive because I like economy, and I’m doing the opposite of what I think. A camera does it quickly. Why am I taking five days to get this going again when I could photograph it? But that gives me a way into making work and making new work. I’m not interested in justifying the work. Justification isn’t something that I am about. In fact, everything links and comes together. It can support the very fragile business of making paintings. It’s fragile how things can just fall apart at any time.

HUO: You often link in your work, which made me think of these long sequences where you combine many, many paintings. Sometimes it goes around the corner of the gallery space. This can also be considered cinematographic. Can you tell us about that?

RW: Yes. I don’t like hemming in or restriction. I like extension, expansion, going on, keeping going. For instance, with the footballers [Yellow Strip, 2006; Fig. 3], I got a whole team of people, and they’re each wearing yellow. I did five separate figures, but the pieces were difficult to fit into our house. I have no idea of practicality, or not much if I do. Things should fit in houses. For instance, any house could take two canvas panels, but five is asking a bit much. Going around the corner is a nice idea—leave space for a door, go around the corner. I quite like big, but then I also like small. I told you I was conflicted—I like both opposing positions.

Scale and Color
HUO: What’s the biggest work you’ve ever done?

RW: The biggest? I think the five footballers.

HUO: The largest paintings can almost become architectural spaces.

RW: Yes, it’s very exciting.

HUO: Of course, there are also decisions involved in terms of colors. Today, when we arrived, the first thing Melissa Blanchflower said was, “Oh, Rose, it’s yellow right now.” She said this because you were wearing a yellow dress and it’s yellow in the paintings around the studio. Then we found out it’s also red and purple in the paintings on view.

RW: Well, I did the drawing in purple felt-tip pen. Purple and yellow have a certain something. I don’t think purples are easy to use, but I did purple and then put it with yellow. It has a certain excitement for me simply because of the different color. I like something different.

HUO: Do you have a favorite color?

RW: No. It depends on which ones I’ve been using. I get tired of one and think, I can’t stick that one anymore, I’ve used it. Then I pick up another one because it’s different. I do like pale green very much. I like green without blue in it. I like green with some black in it. Out there in nature, there’s a lot of yellow in the green and a lot of black in the green. I have to knock the blue out of green. When in reproduction, if the green comes out too blue, I yap on about it, or I change it. I never use it, so why put it in the reproduction when I don’t want it?

HUO: Etel Adnan says the color red always wins. In one drawing, you have the word “red” underlined. What’s red for you?

RW: I used colored pencils, and the red was a bit weedy, so I wrote that the red should be darker. The drawing comes from a watercolor, and in the watercolor, the red was darker. I went along with the logic of the source, which was a watercolor of mine.

HUO: What also struck me is another word that appears in the painting behind us: “selfie.” Can you tell us about your selfie?

RW: I can. I don’t use them at all, but I know other people do, so it’s a point of connection. I like connecting with the world and through the paintings. I like accessibility every kind of way that you can draw it up.

Other Artists
HUO: In this exhibition of Mexican art, which I saw in Buenos Aires last week, I saw a Frida Kahlo painting that she did for her first major show. She placed a mirror the same size as the painting next to the work. It’s a very early presence of the selfie. Do you like Frida Kahlo?

RW: Oh, yes, very much. I’m a fan of Frida Kahlo, especially those pictures of her cutting her hair. She has a man’s suit on with curls all over the floor. It’s a great drawing.

HUO: Who are other artists you like? Who are artists that keep inspiring you?

RW: It’s the early stuff I like—wall paintings and work from emerging cultures: Mexican votive painting, Peruvian, Cuban. I have complete empathy with it; the High Renaissance not so much. I have a place for people of the High Renaissance, but they’re not my favorites. I like more primitive, direct work.

HUO: Any inspirations from our time? The twenty-first or the twentieth century?

RW: Our time? Oh, there are a lot of people. Kerry James Marshall, I like very much. It’s not art he paints; it’s real. You probably know I like Tal R’s approach. I remember seeing a photograph of Jonathan Meese’s work when it appeared in the Saatchi Collection. It was a big painting, and critics all hammered it. But I thought it was great—I like his attitude. I like Judith Bernstein’s drawings very much. There are quite a lot of Black Americans that I like, too.

HUO: Do you like Basquiat?

RW: I have a certain place for Basquiat, yes. I’m also a huge fan of the late paintings by Philip Guston. His early paintings, then his period of abstraction between, and then coming back into figuration, a very particular figuration, I completely love. As soon as you ask me a question, I can’t dredge the things up. I go down and wash up and they all flood into my memory and I think, That lovely person.

HUO: You’ve given a very good answer, and the Guston thing is very interesting.

RW: He’s huge.

HUO: I always ask artists: Who is the artist that most inspires you? Guston is often the answer. He is the ultimate artist’s artist and inspires artists. It would be great to hear a little bit more about what inspires you with Guston.

RW: You can’t do what he did, that’s the thing. If your work looks a bit like his, you have to get rid of it—that’s what I feel. Raymond Pettibon’s drawings are exciting. They’re not artistic, or they’re not arty-farty drawings. They are hard and specific; there is no tautness to them. They don’t look like art school drawings; they look like something else, but they also look very seen and observed. I just think they’re very good.

HUO: Pettibon also has text and image and the hand-drawing thing like you.

RW: Yes. I think he reads more than I do. I deliberately stopped reading because a lot of time goes into reading. Not reading forces you into the business of making an image. You’ll find this very difficult because you obviously read.

HUO: Reading can also prevent you from writing.

RW: Reading prevents you from painting because if you’re not reading, you’re bored. So, what do you do? You draw something because you’re looking at it. Reading is marvelous, but it can prevent you from making a drawing.

Portraiture
HUO: I wanted to ask you about your portraits of athletes, actors, and actresses. Why do you describe them as “portraits from” and not “portraits of” people? It’s not a portrait of Nicole Kidman or Penelope Cruz, for example, it’s a portrait from Kidman or Cruz.

RW: If you push it, all people think it’s going to look like the person. The way I did this was to make observations of how the person is. What is their hair like? What kind of face do they have? What kind of color are they? Their neck to shoulders to head, everything is a list of their icon attributes.

In the case of Penelope Cruz, I listed her attributes: big hairstyle, eyelashes, chest, and small waist. She used to wear rather tight clothes on the top, which bound the chest, therefore, I did a tight chest. Then I did skirts and long legs—all the stuff that goes with stereotypical beauties. I wrote the list down—a ten-point list. I took a piece of writing, then I illustrated it, which is from her because the writing was from her description. It’s a jump. It’s a discontinuation.

HUO: Let’s talk about your Elizabeth piece, ER & ET [2011; Fig. 4].

RW: I read that Elizabeth Taylor had mauve eyes, and when men saw her, they fell on the floor with sheer awe and admiration. I never found her particularly gorgeous, but that was the public idea of Elizabeth Taylor. She had just died, and there were a lot of photographs of her in the paper. She was wearing a green bathing costume in one photograph, and her dark hair was pushed back. She was bathing. I think it was dark around her, and her hair vanished.

In the painting, it’s just her face with a bit of her mauve eyes—I don’t often use mauve. I connected Elizabeth Taylor with Queen Elizabeth I of England. One was queen of Hollywood, and one was Queen of England, so there’s a connection. I’ve been looking at what Elizabeth I wore. She had this marvelous painting of her in a frock with appliquéd eyes and ears on it, which had to do with the spies in the queen’s court at the time. I made a drawing of the eyes and ears and put Elizabeth Taylor on top of the frock. Hence ER, Elizabeth Regina, Elizabeth Taylor, ET. ER and ET. That’s how they’re both queens, in a sense.

HUO: You often talk about a certain quality your work has that could be described as inelegance. Could you tell us what is inelegance, both in painting but also in your amazing fashion—the patches on your clothes and this incredible invention where you deconstruct things?

RW: Yes, because there’s a point where inelegance becomes elegance. The example I use is that if you take a duck and a peacock, it is the peacock that struts. The general idea of a peacock is that it’s beautiful and elegant, but actually, I don’t like peacocks. I far prefer ducks. With their short legs near the ground, they are more complete and a better color. In painting, skill and elegance are at the opposite end of the spectrum from primitive, which is often very real, very felt, and very short.

Daily Process
HUO: As we drove through the village of Faversham, I was wondering, What is a day in the life of Rose Wylie like? Can you tell us about your routine?

RW: I get up late because I go to bed very late. I’ve got no need to do anything for anyone else, so I can stay up as long as I like. I keep the painting continuous; I’m always in here. It’s what I do. I do art-related things most of the time. I also start late because if I haven’t got a painting going, I don’t want to get it started because it’s such a bore. I don’t know what to do, where to go, or what I’m going to do. Once I’ve got through that, I go obsessively late into the evening, night, and early morning.

HUO: It’s an obsessive, nonstop process.

RW: Yes, because I don’t want to leave it suddenly. I’m doing something and don’t want to leave it alone because I think, I’ll just get that a bit better. Then I take it off, and it’s worse. I take it off again, and it’s shit, and I put it back.

HUO: There is this obsessiveness with which you paint ever since you came back to painting in the very late 1970s, early 1980s. I was wondering if you can tell us a little bit about these twenty years in between. There was a period where you stopped painting.

RW: Well, I had three children. Lizzy needed a great deal of care, so she took up a huge amount of my time until she boarded at a Rudolf Steiner Community. That’s when I came back to painting. But I used to draw with them and make their clothes. We used to cook and play around with legs of lamb and fish. You know, physical stuff, food.

HUO: That’s important because you didn’t stop. You continued to draw. And with these daily activities, there is a blurring of art and life. It’s also art.

RW: Yes. It was very much making things in the house. I made curtains, cushions, food. I have the same attitude to food as I have to painting: put a bit more in; it needs something; it doesn’t work now, but it might work later. That’s what I think about: it may not work now, but it might work later.

HUO: Do you have an archive of that time—drawings you made of the curtains or the clothes?

RW: I didn’t do a lot of drawings. I made the curtains, the clothes, and the food. I was involved with being a wife and a mother. I did a bit of drawing, but not seriously. It was only when they were older that I went back to it.

Memory, Chance, and Technology
HUO: I want to ask you a little bit more about memory and the digital age. Here on the floor of your studio, the newspaper says, “Virtual reality headsets could put children’s health at risk.” Of course, we live in a digital age with the total proliferation of images.

The other day, there was an article that talked about a new cemetery of photographs, because there are billions of photographs taken every day that no one will ever look at again. Of course, in a way, if you look at this endless proliferation of images, it means that there is more information. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that there is more memory. It might very well be that amnesia is somewhere at the core of this digital age—which is actually why the historian Eric Hobsbawm said, “We need a protest against forgetting.”

What is your relationship to memory? How does contemporary painting—and your painting, specifically—address the proliferation of images in relation to history and remembering?

RW: I think it’s sifting; I sift. I go through it and think I remember certain things. It is the things I remember that I’m interested in. The memory may not be accurate, but if I have a fond memory of something, the work I make gives me a chance to relate the work to the memory.

My memory, as I’ve said, isn’t good. But because it isn’t good, what sticks is important. And stuff that connects with me is important. Therefore, my work is diarized. It’s work, but it’s private because it’s mine, and it’s also public because it’s shared. But the memory bit that I do is very much mine. It’s a useful sidestep from the neutrality of direct observational drawing. Things can get very caught up in direct observation rather than imaginative jumps into something. Memory helps the imaginative jump, which is real, and therefore, not arbitrary. It’s not self-imposed; it’s concrete—it’s a curious kind of concreteness, but it is concrete.

HUO: Your systems seem to be very open, which invites chance. What’s the role of chance?

RW: I love chance. Chance is like the break in the dotted line. Anything that is out of control, I like. I don’t like too much control. Yet, here I am in an activity where I’ve got to control a certain amount; otherwise, the image doesn’t come out. It doesn’t become. There is control, but I don’t know what the control is because it’s spontaneous and worked on. I told you that I’m conflicted. It’s spontaneous but not spontaneous.

HUO: It’s an oxymoron.

RW: I thought it was pataphysics. Do you know pataphysics? You do know. Pataphysics is rooted in Dada—two conflicting positions. I love chance. Well, that’s coincidence, too. I can get chance up off the newspaper on the floor.

HUO: I keep looking at the newspapers and the sentences on the studio floor.

RW: They are fantastic. I wanted to paint an ear, but I didn’t want to draw any old ear; I wanted a specific ear. The only ear I could see on the floor was Mrs. Thatcher’s. I was painting my daughter, and I thought, I can’t put Mrs. Thatcher’s ear into an image of my daughter, that would be wrong. So I ditched it and found another one—it was a Black lady, and I thought that was absolutely fine. I had a specific chance to which I then latched, but I controlled it, too, because I didn’t take Mrs. Thatcher’s ear.

HUO: What’s your connection to technology? Did the internet change the way you work?

RW: I love the computer. I only came to it recently because my husband did all my computer work, and he had excellent tripods, cameras, and Canons. I only have a little Unix camera. I like computers, but I do think they’re a hazard because you’re never in the place where you are. I think that’s a bother. You’re always projecting somewhere else. Some people think that’s release, but I think that’s too much release, and you need to be where you are. I like to be where I am.

Contributor Biographies

Hans Ulrich Obrist
Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Zurich, Switzerland) is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show World Soup (The Kitchen Show) in 1991, he has curated more than three hundred exhibitions.

Wylie is the recipient of the John Moores Painting Prize, presented by the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2014); and the Royal Academy of Arts’ Charles Wollaston Award (2015). The same year, she was also elected as a Senior Royal Academician. Wylie lives and works in Kent, England.

This interview accompanies Rose Wylie’s AAM exhibition, where i am and was, curated by Max Weintraub, and on view at the Aspen Art Museum.

Copyright © 2020 Aspen Art Museum, the artist, and the authors. All rights reserved. No part of this interview may be reproduced in any manner without the written consent of the publisher.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyrighted material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions.

AAM exhibitions are made possible by the Marx Exhibition Fund. Further support is provided by the AAM National Council. Additional support for Rose Wylie’s exhibition is provided by David Zwirner.

Support for AAM publications is provided by the Toby Devan Lewis Publications Fund.