The Royal Academy is billing Rose Wylie as a “rebel artist” for her forthcoming show and at 91, she finds there’s still a lot to rebel against. An establishment that has long underrated women’s work, for one: astonishingly, hers is the first solo show by a British woman to occupy all the academy’s main galleries. Being pigeonholed is another: her giant canvases – with their bold colours, painted texts and wild juxtapositions (Nicole Kidman meets ancient Egypt at a Kent community centre) – have been compared to the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Philip Guston. But she does not identify with any one movement and dislikes art that is “up your arse”.
For more than 60 years now, Wylie has lived in her low-slung, 17th-century house in Sittingbourne, Kent, where she rebels against conventional domesticity. Jasmine grows in a tangle through the kitchen ceiling and bouquets of dead flowers crowd another room. A ceramic horse given to her by the actor James Norton, a collector, lies by the windowsill. Next to the sink, two plates of petrified cakes are fuzzy with cobwebs. “I bought that biscuit in Costa two years ago,” says Sara, who works at Wylie’s London gallery, pointing to one of them. She thinks there’s a Battenberg buried somewhere upstairs in the studio.
