If you were to take a midnight walk through Newnham, a quiet village in the leafy heart of Kent, you might notice one window still lit up. Rose Wylie likes to work into the early hours. The British artist staples a fresh roll of raw, unstretched canvas on to the wall, then paints alone, in silence. “My work habits aren’t frightfully good,” the 90-year-old admits. “I’m obsessed with what I’m doing and I don’t care about where the paint goes or how I use the brushes.”
Wylie’s paintings — 6ft tall, adorned with squashed faces and gnomic captions, crackling with drips and smears — look like comic strips that have grown unruly. Her pictures have been compared to Philip Guston and Jean-Michel Basquiat, although she summarises them as: “It’s like what you don’t do if you’re an artist. Can you sense that?”
On a bright morning in February, she greets me in a paint-speckled jacket and yellow tights, silver hair framing pink-tinted shades. “I don’t appear rebellious,” she says, her voice softly patrician. “But I actually am. I can be very rude and difficult.”
Wylie’s studio is anarchic, the floor lined with churned-up newspaper and dried paint. “Artists sometimes say hard floors make their back ache. This is like a carpet,” she says. Wylie is always wiping her brushes on the furniture. Once, when she ran out of brushes, she picked a giant thistle from her garden and used that instead.
She’s lived in the same 17th-century cottage for the past half century. Her husband, the artist Roy Oxlade, died in 2014. Pete, a plump rescue cat, keeps her company. “I’m a recluse,” she says. “Bit of a hermit.”
Her breakthrough, after decades in obscurity, was her inclusion in 2010’s Women to Watch show at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington — the same year Germaine Greer hailed her as “seriously cool”. She was 75. Accolades and retrospectives soon piled up. “I was lucky,” she says of coming to notice much later in life. “But I also believed there was something in my painting that did it. It isn’t quite like other people’s.”
In the space of a few years her paintings went from fetching a few thousand at auction to commanding six figures. (Collectors include the actor James Norton and, less auspiciously, the rapper P Diddy.) Recently, Wylie modelled for Loewe — photographed by Juergen Teller. “I like to be in all the major museums,” she says without modesty. “But money itself I’m not interested in. Though I’d quite like to buy an early Cézanne, or an El Greco painting. I’m not interested in fast cars or big houses.” She laughs. “Have you got a fast car?”
Not everyone has been a fan. The late critic Brian Sewell called her art “a daub worthy of a child of four”. Was she upset? “No, no! I thought it was wonderful. Obviously, he found me difficult. But then I found him out of place, totally out of time. I didn’t find it in the least bit hurtful.”
Next February, Wylie tells me proudly over a lunch of pork pie and red wine in her kitchen, she will become the first British woman to have a major solo exhibition in the main galleries at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. (Marina Abramović was the first female artist to have a solo show there, in 2023.) How does Wylie really feel about the rush of new admirers? “It makes me giggle sometimes when I’m doing the washing up,” she says. “Especially when people don’t know quite how to handle it because they think you’re just a floozy and an artist’s wife and a mother. And then the thing that affects them is the amount of money you get for a painting.”
Her own tastes run deep, from ancient Roman portraiture to footballers. Sometimes, she imagines alternative endings to Quentin Tarantino films. A neighbour’s daughter cleaning a car in a bikini inspired another series of pictures. She’s painted Nicole Kidman in a backless dress (Wylie recently watched Moulin Rouge! “She sang like a crow, harsh, no wobble, it was funny. She was very beautiful in it.”)
Lately, Wylie has been painting her granddaughter (also named Rose), for an exhibition next month at David Zwirner in London. She gestures towards “Little Rose, Hall” (2025), the paint still wet. Wylie has pictured her standing by the fireplace in the hallway, although there’s no distinction between where the ceiling and floor begin or end — typical of how her paintings pull your perspective off balance. Her granddaughter’s dark blue dress sits on top of a primrose yellow that, Wylie notes, is particularly good at catching the sunlight.
“I like contrast,” she tells me. “I think contrast is life — light and shade. It’s death that doesn’t have so much contrast. It’s a bit much the same.”
Another work in the show was prompted by a BBC documentary about the Tudors. Bloody Mary “wasn’t a beautiful queen. I didn’t want to make her pretty. I didn’t want to make her soppy.” Faces are difficult, she says. “They can start to look too serious, or too formidable, or too tight-arsed.” Wylie prefers shoulders, showing me how she’s accentuated the monarch’s upper arms. “I do think men have the advantage. I stick kitchen paper into mine as I have quite small ones.”
Mary is backed by an expanse of sooty blackness. “I pushed it in,” Wylie says, miming dragging the brush across. That’s how she talks about her pictures — the paint is “shoved”, “scrubbed” and “slapped on”. It’s hard work. “The thread shows, the paint shows, the blobs show.”
Wylie likes that “you can see that I’ve changed my mind” where she’s glued over pieces of canvas, or even totally removed the paint with a palette knife and flung it to the floor. Her paintings are testament to her constant reworking. “It’s like cleaning your oven,” she says. “It’s like housework.”
Wylie was born in Kent in 1934. “I was the seventh child. I was not pampered,” she recalls. She spent part of her childhood abroad, although she doesn’t remember much of it. “My father was the director of ordnance for the whole of India, which was quite a powerful position, but he wasn’t power-seeking. He hated advertisement. He particularly loathed self-advertisement.”
She does remember living in London during the second world war. “I saw it,” she says, “the doodlebugs.” Decades later, in “Park Dogs & Air Raid” (2017) she painted that terrifying time, and slyly upturned it. Planes buzz across the sky, battle erupting in cartoonish explosions, while dogs and ducks amble around Kensington Gardens below.
Wylie went on to Folkestone and Dover School of Art. As a student, she briefly modelled as an “Aero girl”, posing for nationwide adverts for the confectionery brand Rowntree’s. (She dislikes the portrait.) But any hopes of a career were put on ice for several decades while she raised three children with her husband. “I was a mother and a wife. I was cooking, making curtains, running a house.” She stopped painting altogether, only beginning again in her late forties. Wylie received her MA from the Royal College of Art in 1981.
Returning to art wasn’t just a relief — it was intoxicating. “Suddenly, I did it all the time,” she says. “You’re fresh to it. And you’ve also seen a lot, and heard a lot, and read a lot. You can channel it back.” Still, she’s uneasy about her life being made to fit a familiar story of excluded artist mothers. “Feminists find this difficult. You know how the children of artists sometimes are marginalised? My children weren’t,” she says. “I just think that people are important. I think being a wife was important too.”
These days, you have to race to keep up with Wylie’s imagination. One recent painting is of an “inadequacy dream” she had, in which she struggled to clean a brick floor with a scrubbing brush containing five bristles. Another painting, “Lilith and Gucci Boy” (2024), based on the Babylonian “Burney Relief” at the British Museum — and which will be shown at a retrospective at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland, this summer — is enough for Wylie to enthuse at length about the Mesopotamian deity Lilith. “She was not submissive. Blimey. She fraternised with Satan. You find her in computer games, Pre-Raphaelite poetry . . . it’s wildly interesting.”
What will catch her eye next? Recently, she’s been painting plums and their leaves on a pretty green dish. It reminds her of wall paintings in Pompeii. “Here we are, frightful stuff going on in Gaza, terrible stuff going on between Putin and Ukraine,” she says with feeling. “And what am I doing? I’m painting plums on a dish. How stupid! But it’s escape.”
‘When Found becomes Given’, April 3-May 23, davidzwirner.com; ‘Flick and Float’, Zentrum Paul Klee, July 19-October 5; Royal Academy, February 2026
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