Artist Rose Wylie was born in 1934 in Kent. Not finding fame until her mid-70s, she has since exhibited at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC and at Tate Britain. As a young woman, she was painted by Anthony Devas for the Aero Girl ad campaign. Her current work juxtaposes bright, abstract paintings with plain, unprimed canvases. In 2014 she won the John Moores Painting prize and in 2015 the Charles Wollaston award for “most distinguished work” in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. She is the subject of Imagine, which airs on BBC One tonight.
1. Book
Dark Ecology, Timothy Morton (2016)
A little while ago I decided to give up reading, so I’d have much more time for painting and drawing. But I’ve been told I must read this book, and I think it’s very important. It argues that the current dualism between man and nature is a mistake; that separation shouldn’t exist, but we’ve pushed it in terms of agriculture, industrial food production and so on. On a smaller scale, I’m interested because I have a garden which I do not try to control; it takes its own shape. A lot of people see it as neglect, but I don’t, and it’s interesting to substantiate what I’m doing with more general movements as expressed in books like this.
2. Talk
Frida Escobedo, Serpentine Gallery
I went to this very good live panel discussion last month. Escobedo, who has done this year’s pavilion at the Serpentine, was in conversation with one of her tutors [architect Mohsen Mostafavi], the woman who’d written the text for her catalogue [Marina Otero Verzier] and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. They talked about building in a sense which embraced nature: her pavilion has opacity and transparency, depending on where you stand, so the outside comes in sometimes but not all the time. This led to her ideas about duration and modality. I actually found the pavilion more interesting after the talk. And Escobedo reminded me of Frida Kahlo, because she is Mexican and her name was Frida and she had a quite lively, very definite face. I liked her a lot.
3. Film
A Fantastic Woman (Dir: Sebastián Lelio, 2017)
I thought it was interesting that it was actually a transgender actress, Daniela Vega, taking the part of a transgender woman in this film. It’s about the difficulty she has, as a transgender person, with the society around her in Santiago, Chile. Vega was brilliant, and as a painter I appreciated that she has a marvellous face. Someone in the film referred to her legs as footballer legs, but in fact she had wonderful legs and she wore the most terrific little ankle boots, which cut her legs off visually in a very good proportion, rather like Pina Bausch would have done. The very notion of somebody acting according to what they felt was their identity, and finding opposition from society, is a very contemporary theme.
4. Architecture
The Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba
I can’t stop using the Mosque of Córdoba as an example of glorious, defiant excess. I haven’t actually been there, but my son went to Córdoba recently and showed me photographs of the mosque, which dates back to the tenth century and was later converted to a Roman Catholic church. I was exhilarated to see these rows and rows of pillars and striped arches running down visually on top of each other. It’s so wondrously excessive, and the colours – flowerpot-orange on stone putty – completely fit. I used a similar colour in a painting I did called Tube Girls, based on a photograph by Malick Sidibé.
5. Exhibition
Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy, at Tate Modern
I haven’t seen the Frida Kahlo show at the V&A yet, so I’m going with Picasso at Tate Modern. It was a great idea to narrow it down to one year’s painting, and I liked the difference between the beginning of the show – which was darker and more serious – and the marvellous relief as you go through. There were a few paintings I hadn’t seen before, and I found them very good. One that stood out was of Dora Maar, with a very white and completely round face turned up. It reminded me of a painting I’d just done of a completely round face on a plain canvas. When I saw the Picasso, I got a sort of shimmer from it, a sense of shared invention.
6. Restaurant
The Sportsman, Seasalter, Kent
I rarely go to restaurants – I’m a poor artist – but the chef-owner of the Sportsman, Stephen Harris, is a friend of my children, so I do occasionally go there. I like the building, the fact that it doesn’t look tarted up – it’s the right colour for the edge of the sea. There are nice planks on the floor… I like planks. He makes his own butter and salt, which doesn’t actually matter too much to me, but I think it matters to other people. He once sent me this delicious steak and kidney pie with an oyster in the middle – that was a nice touch. I very much like his attitude.
.jpg?w=600)
