“I love weak – or huge – footballers!” Rebellious artist Rose Wylie continues painting until three in the morning at 92 | Art and design

TThe Royal Academy labels Rose Wylie a ‘rebel artist’ for its upcoming show, and at the age of 92, she finds there is still much to rebel against. An institution that has long underestimated women’s work, it is surprising that its exhibition is the first solo show by a British woman to occupy all of the Academy’s major galleries. And their classification is another matter: her giant canvases – with their bold colours, graphic text and wild juxtapositions (Nicole Kidman meets ancient Egypt at the Kent Community Centre) – have been compared to the works of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Philip Guston. But she doesn’t identify with any one movement and hates art that “falls on your ass.”

For more than 60 years, Willie has lived in her low-slung 17th-century house in Sittingbourne, Kent, where she rebels against traditional domestic life. Jasmine grows tangled across the kitchen ceiling, and bunches of dead flowers crowd into another room. A ceramic horse given to her by collector James Norton rests next to the windowsill. Next to the sink, two plates of fuzzy petrified cakes with cobwebs. “I bought these biscuits from Costa two years ago,” says Sarah, who works at Wiley Gallery in London, pointing to one. She believes there is a Battenberg buried somewhere upstairs in the studio.

It would be rude and wrong to describe the house as a mess. There are extraordinary amounts of things, but they are clean and tidy, because even though Willie lives alone, she loves visitors. The logs are burned in an open fireplace, and they complement the color of the stockings (blue-grey). We realized I’d dressed up as a tribute, because Willie often works in tights and a skirt, but today she’s wearing gray plaid slacks and a navy blazer, accented with plum lipstick. She loves clothes – “people come closest to painting and sculpture in their daily lives” – and Juergen Teller recently photographed her here for a Loewe campaign. “He had a little pink camera and one pink fingernail,” Willie says happily.

We climbed the stairs into her studio, strung with strip lights and carpeted thickly with newsprint, a tsunami of Guardian pages curling around cans of dried oil paint. She notes that it is deliciously soft to walk on, and much better for a painter’s back than concrete. Can we also agree not to call it “waste”? “Journalists talk about the newspaper, and that is beside the point. My position is that you don’t come and explain it, you come and work.” Before the pandemic, a Korean team photographed the room inch by inch and recreated it in Seoul. During lockdown, Willie saw people posting photos of this identical studio on Instagram – “these amazingly dressed women, in this environment. It was a great contrast.”

Exquisite contrast is at the heart of her work, which is driven not by subject matter or biography but by images she finds interesting – whether Roman mosaics, television or early Renaissance art. It is the enormous mental leaps Willy makes that give her paintings their energy and intelligence: the curving footpath in her garden becomes a hexagon as an homage to Werner Herzog’s 2009 film My Son, My Son, What Have You Done? She talked me through a favorite painting in the kitchen, an aerial shot of World War II bombs flying over the desert. “The Doodlebugs didn’t go to the desert, they went from Calais to London.” Willie points to a large silhouette at the bottom of the painting. “And here’s a black duck, because this is Arezzo, and Italian cities have coats of arms. Arezzo doesn’t have a duck, but I thought it would be fun.” She also put two women on the wings of the bomb “for fun.”

Fun is what it’s all about. Willie’s eyes are filled with mischief as she explains her strange lines of thinking, while her beloved Betty sleeps under her chin. All of the Royal Academy’s works had been shipped, but four new paintings were stapled to the walls, two of which were inspired by the fence. “The top of my garden was quite desolate – the ivy had taken over. But my neighbor needed a new fence, and the guys came with a backhoe and cleared the space. It was annoying. But I saved the loss by turning it into a painting.” She calls the result, a bold diptych depicting a lemon-yellow house jutting over an orange fence, the Jumbo Meat Chopper, because the two elements make up the shape of the blade. “I’m very happy with it.”

Sixteen years ago, Wiley was almost unknown; Today its works are on hold in Los Angeles, Cologne and Ghent. Kidman’s Kent painting, Black Strap (Red Fly), sold for £220,500 in 2021. After studying at Folkestone and Dover School of Art in the 1950s, it took her 20 years to raise her three children, and it was not until 2010, aged 76, that she got her big break, when she was selected for a group show at the National Gallery of Women in the Arts in Washington DC. That same year, Germaine Greer, a columnist for The Guardian, came to visit.

“I got a text asking her to talk to me, and at nine o’clock in the morning she was at the door.” The two women looked at the canvases, looking for something Greer might buy. “She said she was absolutely obsessed, because carrying all the paintings was physically difficult. Germaine wrote a piece that was very helpful.” Willie subsequently had a show at Hastings, a room at Tate Britain, and interest from New York, Moscow and Berlin.

Being a painter was not something she felt she could combine with motherhood. “If you are engaged, emotionally and mentally, in drawing that is absorbing you, your mind is somewhere else. I decided it was better to be around. People say, ‘Are you angry?’ I was never angry, because working with children is so full of creativity.” In the kitchen is a photo of her smoking cigars with her daughter Henrietta and son Luke John, who is now her archivist.

For a long time, Willie’s husband, the painter Roy Oxlade, was the most famous artist. He died in 2014: Is she sad that he is not here to share her success? “Well, it can affect the other person. If you have two people drawing and one of them gets a lot of attention, it means it’s not so hot for the other one. So it could have been difficult. But he was always supportive.”

They used to watch Match of the Day together, and that’s where her interest in football players started. Not just any footballer: they have to have a certain something. “I like big and I like weak.” Ronaldinho made the cut, as did Thierry Henry, Wayne Rooney and Peter Crouch: she drew them all flying around the same pitch in the yellow stripe in 2006. Who catches her eye on TV now? Did she like traitors? “No. The person who runs it, visually, is not my type. She’s too creepy. I like Isabelle Huppert, she’s a more metaphysical person.”

Willie emerged from motherhood burning with ambition. She remembers seeing Turner Prize-winning director Steve McQueen’s 1997 film Deadpan, in which a building repeatedly collapses around him, and wanted to do something big and immersive. She painted widely and entered every competition, producing works that commanded confidence: a dusting of Snow White alongside the slogan “One Day Her Prince Will Come”; An aerial view of Bayswater during the Blitz, where her mother moved the family in 1940.

She remembers those air raids as exciting but childhood didn’t matter much to Wiley. Until she was five or four years old, she lived in India, where her father was head of the Munitions Department in the last years of the British Raj, south of Mumbai. When war broke out, they moved to England, where she inherited the Winsor & Newton paint fund. “My mother suggested I put it in the bathroom and clean it, but I resented that. I never wanted to clean the paint. It’s still the same.”

Wiley has been underrated for most of her life — as a wife, mother, late starter, and model. In her twenties, she was painted for an Aero chocolate advertisement, a traditional portrait of a swan-necked beauty whom she dislikes (“It’s not very good”). Now she’s making up for lost time, working until 3 a.m. on another show in Paris: a series that maps her home from the inside out; Dinner party with guests from Jane Austen. after that? “I would like to be in all the major museums around the world. I want to be part of the history of visual culture.”

What will you draw next? “I’m a big fan of Henri Rousseau’s Unpleasant Surprise. There’s a naked woman, a bear, and a man with a gun.” Her plan is to replace the woman with Bette Davis with clothes. “Betty Davis has good quality, Betty Grable doesn’t. She’s rubbish by comparison.” Willey is keen to explain the difference because it’s key to what she does: finding the thing that makes a painting come alive. “Bette Davis is significantly more private. She has a very strong mouth — a Slob From the mouth. “It’s a lot of fun.”

Downstairs Sarah set the table for lunch and Pete was kicked out of the meat pie. “Because he got a turd stuck in the front of a Rolls-Royce,” Willie talks about other artists she enjoys, the fun artists – Rachel Whiteread and Franz West. When it was time for me to leave, she gave me a giant scotch egg. “Eat it on the train,” she says. “Everyone will be watching with envy!”