Rose Wylie: ‘Anything That Is Out of Control, I Like’

March 26, 2026 by Dycella Admin

Rose Wylie - *Pink Skater (Will I Win, Will I Win)*, 2015
Photograph courtesy Jari Lager: Soon-Hak Kwon © Rose Wylie)

I recently enjoyed an exhibition of the work of Rose Wylie - the first British female artist to occupy all of the Royal Academy’s main galleries. (‘The Picture Comes First’ is at the Royal Academy, London until 19 April.)

‘I love chance. It breaks through notions of control, of knowing what you were going to do before you do it.’
Rose Wylie

Born in Hythe in 1934, Wylie studied painting at Folkestone and Dover School of Art in the 1950s. Having taken an extended career break to raise three children, from the 1980s she devoted herself to her art, basing herself in a studio in her Kent cottage. She still works there today.

‘In painting I don’t like too much pernickety, precious fiddling about. Perhaps you’ve noticed.’

Wylie’s big canvases are painted in bold, bright colours, thickly applied, in a loose, spontaneous style. They integrate distant memories and recent experiences; animals, flora and fauna; references from history and mythology, from cinema, celebrity and popular culture.

‘It’s better to just get on… Just get on and do what you’re going to do. Thinking too much can wreck or inhibit ‘spontaneous.’’

Here are birds, ducks and ack-ack fire. German planes fly overhead while dogs cavort in Kensington Gardens. (Wylie experienced the Blitz as a young girl.) Here are attentive cats, a big red elephant, an irreverent anatomical diagram of a horse. We see Premiership footballers and Olympic swimmers; Choco Leibniz, a well-cooked omelette and red lips licking a coffee spoon. Some friends take dinner outside on a summer evening. There’s a seating plan. And here’s Penelope Cruz on a bench, and Rita Tushingham with an axe.

Wylie is interested in the visual impact of images rather than the story they tell. Revelling in incongruous juxtapositions, her pictures are quirky, playful, joyful.

‘Usually I paint something I’ve seen, but I may fiddle with the scale, context and rules of gravity. I draw from observation, memory and with ‘conceptual projection.’’

Wylie clearly has a fondness for fashion. She paints her ‘50s-era bullet-bra, her favourite red lipstick and checked skirt, her dress with the padded shoulders. She paints cut-out paper dolls.

‘I like stuff that goes across time, through trans-temporality, or whatever you want to call it.’

Sometimes she adds text. Underneath a reclining female figure, she writes: ‘Bathing costume green. Glamour personified.’ Accompanying an ice skater in a pale pink dress: ‘Will I win.’ Alongside Snow White holding a duster: ‘Some day her prince will come.’

Wylie draws every day in sketchbooks, on large sheets and scraps of paper. She has an insatiable curiosity, an avid interest in her immediate surroundings and in the world beyond. Her drawings form a memory bank, a treasure trove of ideas to which she constantly returns for inspiration. Her studio floor, covered with layers of newspapers, also acts as a source of stimulus.

‘Chance can bring in something totally new and unexpected…a cure for boredom… Chance is like the break in the dotted line. Anything that is out of control, I like.’

Wylie reminds us that, though we are endlessly trying to impose order, structure and logic on our thoughts, our mental processes are often erratic; coincidence causes fresh associations; and memories tend to be messy - jumbled, fluid, confusing.

‘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.’

Wylie teaches creative people to liberate the imagination from classification and control; to be constantly curious, open to stimulus from all sorts of sources; to draw on recollections and experiences; to embrace the random, spontaneous and the incongruous; to make free associations. And, critically, to regard age as an advantage, not an adversary.

‘Age has more appeal [than youth]…There’s more ‘longer backwards’ to work with – and coincidences and connections have more time to happen.’

'Confusion in her eyes that says it all,
She's lost control.
And she's clinging to the nearest passerby,
She's lost control.
And she gave away the secrets of her past,
And said, "I've lost control again."
And of a voice that told her when and where to act.
She said, "I've lost control again.”'

Joy Division, ‘She’s Lost Control’ (B Sumner/ P Hook/ S Morris/ I Curtis)

No. 561

Shaving in the Dark: No Worker Is an Island

July 30, 2020 by Dycella Admin

'No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’
John Donne

In the early nineties I decided to focus on my work. I determined to reduce my socialising and increase my industry. I would rise early and return late. I would put my nose to the grindstone and my foot to the floor.

I was living on my own in a one bedroom flat on Peckham Rye. It had no pictures adorning the magnolia walls, no lampshades to soften the harsh electric light, no curtains to shut out curious eyes. But I had everything I needed for the limited time I planned to spend there: a big floral sofa and a modest TV; a rudimentary hi-fi and a substantial record collection arrayed in cardboard boxes across the floor.

At night I dined on cream crackers and cheese, or takeaway curry washed down with cans of Breaker. I became obsessed with domestic efficiency. In a bid to cut down on washing-up, I took to using paper plates and plastic cutlery. I’m not sure I was too environmentally conscious in those days.

Sometimes, late at night, the number 12 would pause at the junction outside my flat, and the occupants of the top deck would look in on me, isolated and alone with a tray on my lap.

Every day I got up at an ungodly hour to catch that same bus into work. The early bird catches the worm. However, at length I was confronted by my downstairs neighbour, Jerry. My dawn rising had been waking him and his wife, and he wasn’t happy. In particular he found the extractor fan in my bathroom thoroughly irritating.

The offending fan was synchronized with the bathroom light, and it’s fair to say it did make something of an industrial racket. However, rather than getting it fixed, silenced or disconnected, I determined that it would be best to conduct my ablutions on tiptoes without illumination - anything to avoid another awkward encounter with an irate Jerry. After a few attempts it seemed perfectly possible to shower and brush my teeth in the gloom. But shaving in the dark proved particularly challenging.

As I slumped into my seat on the top deck of the number 12, with tissue paper stuck to my wounded neck, I reflected that maybe I was spending too much time on my own.

'A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke.'
Vincent Van Gogh

I read recently about research into longevity carried out by science journalist Marta Zaraska ('Growing Young: How Friendship, Optimism and Kindness Can Help You Live to 100’, featured in The Guardian, 22 June 2020).

Zaraska, having reviewed the many academic papers on the subject, has learned that how long we live is only 20% to 25% determined by our genes. Of course, food and nutrition also play their part in prolonging life - a Mediterranean diet (rich in fruit and vegetables; using olive oil instead of butter) reduces the risk of premature death by 21%. But, significantly, having a large network of friends cuts that risk by 45%. Indeed one study claims that each extra person in one’s social circle lowers the chance of dying within five years by 2%.

In short, happy sociable extroverts tend to live longer than unhappy antisocial introverts.

'So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them.'
Sylvia Plath

The particular importance of sociability in determining longevity is illustrated by the case of Roseto, Pennsylvania. In the early ‘60s the inhabitants of this small district were found to have very low rates of heart disease. Researchers discovered that the population of predominantly Italian immigrants had, since arriving in the States, largely given up their traditional Mediterranean diet. But they had retained their sociable community lifestyle, and this was the critical factor in their superior health.

As Zaraska observes:

‘Maybe the life-prolonging aspect of the Mediterranean diet is not the amount of vegetables and olive oil it contains, but the way these foods are eaten: together with others.’

I was considering Zaraska’s insights in the light of our recently enforced embrace of Working From Home.

Many argue that the new model should be sustained beyond lockdown. There’s no doubt that technology now enables more fluid, more efficient work practices. Individuals are rejoicing at the prospect of an end to commuting, to mundane water cooler conversations and tiresome sandwich lunches; at the opportunity for a superior work-life balance. And industry is jumping at the chance of reduced rents.

But businesses may find that they still need some social glue to transfer corporate knowledge and culture, to sustain brand loyalty and coherence. And individuals may yet yearn for physical interaction - to progress their careers, to preserve their sanity, and indeed to prolong their lives. A company is as much a community as it is a means of creating wealth.

'It is important for us to know if we are alone in the dark.'
Stephen Hawking

By the end of the ‘70s, many Rosetans had moved on to more spacious, more remote homes, and were travelling around by car rather than on foot. Sadly, as their sociability diminished, their mortality rate fell into line with the rest of the United States.

I’m pleased to say my own period of solitary confinement was ended - before I went completely off the rails - by the arrival of my now wife.

'Mother I tried please believe me,
I'm doing the best that I can.
I'm ashamed of the things I've been put through,
I'm ashamed of the person I am.
Isolation, isolation, isolation.’
Joy Division, ‘Isolation’ (B Sumner / I Curtis / P Hook / S Morris)

No. 291

Punk Entrepreneurism: ‘Open Up the Door, I’ll Get It Myself.’

September 02, 2016 by Jim Carroll

It’s October 1977. Some young punks are being interviewed about the closure of the Electric Circus nightclub in Manchester. We see a gaggle of teenagers wearing cheap plastic sunglasses and safety pins in their ears; girls with thick black eyeliner; one lad with a bike chain round his neck. They explain their commitment to the cause:

‘I wanted to do something for me. Look at me now. I’m nothing.’
‘That’s what punk is.’

That was indeed the essence of punk. It was a short-lived musical movement that punctured the pomposity at the heart of the ‘70s British rock scene. It demolished the distance between performers and their audience. It gave music back to ordinary young people. Punk was speed, anger and urgency. It was Joe Strummer’s revolutionary zeal, Siouxsie’s swagger and John Lydon’s sneer. It was New Rose, Germfree Adolescent, Alternative Ulster. It was ‘a voice crying in the wilderness.’

Brilliant times in Manchester, Electric Circus.

I was only 12 when punk arrived, unannounced and unkempt, and shocked Britain out of its concrete slumber. And within a few short years ‘the filth and the fury’ was gone. But the movement cast a long shadow over British youth culture. It re-set the clock, and 1976 became a kind of Year Zero after which everything would be different.

I recently attended a small exhibition at the British Library celebrating forty years since the birth of punk in Britain. (Some have observed that you can’t get anything less punk than an exhibition at the British Library, but it was interesting nonetheless. It runs until 2 October.) The exhibition begins by highlighting the intellectual roots of the movement. Punk emerged from a rich brew of rebellious street fashion, avant-garde American rock and art school anarchism. A modish punk t-shirt of the time quoted a French Situationist slogan:

‘Be reasonable, demand the impossible.’

But punk also had its own more populist libertarian spirit. Punk musicians taught themselves to play, wrote their own songs, performed on their own terms; they worked with independent record companies, producers and managers, designed their own artwork. Punk is often represented as an entirely destructive force, but it was also constructive, empowering and enabling. It was about doing it yourself; doing it for yourself.

I was thrilled to find at the exhibition an original copy of a call-to-arms that appeared in a small London fanzine, Sideburns, in 1977. Over the years I’d seen many reproductions of this graphic, but had not come across an original.

‘This is a chord (A). This is another (E). This is a third (G). Now form a band.’

I remember at the time thinking what an exciting exhortation this was. Hitherto we’d imagined rock’n’roll as an arcane pursuit for the gifted elite; for those with a head start and a healthy bank balance. Music was an industry, rock was a career, an album was a concept. But punk reduced pop to its fundamentals, demystified it and encouraged everyone to have a go.

There was some debate at the time as to whether punk’s spirit of self-sufficiency and enterprise was in some respects Thatcherite. But this rebellious libertarian instinct was part of a long tradition amongst the oppressed and the disadvantaged, the bored and the unfulfilled. In 1969 James Brown sang:

‘I don’t want nobody
To give me nothing.
Open up the door,
I’ll get it myself.’

Of course in business we may recognise this as the entrepreneurial urge: the instinct to cast off corporate shackles and company conventions; to break off, break out and break away; to make one’s own mark on the world. The entrepreneurial spirit is rare, bold and admirable. We should treasure, protect and encourage it.

Moreover, in the Age of Technology it seems more possible than ever to ‘open up the door and get it yourself.’ As the world becomes more connected, there are infinite opportunities for both fusion and fission; for corporate aggregation and, at the same time, independent disengagement. So there’s never been a better time to go your own way. Have code - will travel. It’s exhilarating. It's punk entrepreneurism.

I should say that, whilst I have always admired the entrepreneurial spirit in others, I’m not sure I ever had it myself. I didn’t call up my mates in the late ‘70s to start a band. And I didn’t email my colleagues in the late ‘90s to start an agency. I was a company guy, a ‘salaryman.’ And there’s no shame in that. Leaders need followers. Entrepreneurs need executors.

Perhaps, ultimately, that’s what punk taught us: everyone can, but not everyone does.

‘When you look in the mirror do you see yourself?
Do you see yourself
On the TV screen?
Do you see yourself
In the magazine?
When you see yourself
Does it make you scream?
Identity is the crisis.
Can’t you see?
Identity, Identity.’

X-Ray Spex- Identity

No. 96