Big Pictures

By Sammi Gale

Rose Wylie’s The Picture Comes First begins with a dogfight over London. Planes with wings and noses rounded like pebbles attack one another in the sky; beneath this fight, dogs. A curious equivalence is established between the airborne and earthbound commotion. The painting looks back in time with the hindsight of adulthood; up at the sky, with the wonder of childhood; down, at the dogs and ducks in the park, timelines and perspectives joined as easily as the four canvases slotted together to make one big one, get over it. In turn, the viewer looks up because the work is huge. Beefy, against the Royal Academy’s classical proportions.

To the left, another painting of the Second World War uses tally-marks for tufts of grass — III, III, III — giving the ground a kind of bounce. Fragments of place names, ELM WALK, FARNBOROUGH PARK, run diagonally and horizontally across the canvas. The combined effect is of scattered recollection. 

Speaking of collection, Wylie is nothing if not an exacting magpie – or perhaps transistor – of images. Having begun with the artist’s childhood, you’d be forgiven for thinking the exhibition could proceed chronologically; refreshing then to move associatively instead, with wit and speed through the yawning galleries – Ack Ack (2003), for instance, being the sound of both anti-aircraft artillery and a duck, and in the next room, beaks abound. As pointed out by RW & Bird (1996), the beaks look like bullet-shaped bras. The bra looks like Henry IV’s nose in profile. In Yellow Henry (1996), he’s given the Easter Island treatment, a block head bobbing lemonlike around the picture plane. An eye of a similar scale next to it evokes that classic cinematic trope of peering through a keyhole before a jump scare. 

In fact, one room is devoted to the artist’s love of film. In Wylie’s hands, Quentin Tarantino’s choreographed violence becomes something closer to Renaissance pageantry — flat, frontal, faintly ceremonial. She has described Uma Thurman’s severed arm with blood spurting out of it in Kill Bill as resembling a fountain in a Renaissance painting. ‘High’ art and pop iconography circulate freely. Looking itself — greedy, profligate, delighted — is put front and centre.

Excitement here is contagious. Mood and method. I found myself enjoying this exhibition in a way I haven’t in a long time. Is that allowed in neo-Palladian? Excitement in the painting’s subjects — trips to see Snow White, party clothes, seating plans, match days — is matched by the charged formal decisions that carry you between them. The ‘ruled lines’ in RW & Bird, for instance, like the artist has painted her notebook rather than from her notes, add another coating of mediation. Moments like these zip the viewer around, from the simplest of pleasures – The Well-Cooked Omelette (1989), the earliest work in the exhibition – to complex ones, like the table plan, or the spectacle of football. The artist’s attention is both casual and exacting, offhand yet precise. You’d want to be on holiday with Rose Wylie, she’d say, Oh, look at that, and be so right. 

The exhibition ends with a room titled 'The Process Makes the Image': four vast monochrome paintings, made directly with the artist’s hands. They are full of energy, even a kind of mud-kitchen mischief. Here, the tension between making and made is at its most explicit, yet throughout the exhibition Wylie reminds us of the way images are mediated. It’s a question of attention: light, precise: nothing is too minor to register, nor too monumental to be quietly undone. 

In the following exchange we talked about risk, excitement and transformation.

Sammi Gale

Could you say something about excitement and the sense of lightness in your work?

Rose Wylie

So pleased you sensed ‘excitement' in my work.  I usually work with something I find visually exciting,  in the hope the excitement would be ’there’—that is, apparent—in the work, and stay there till it's finished. It's easy for it to get painted out, even if it was there in the beginning. Would it matter if the artist were bored silly with the subject even before starting? I don’t know.  And anyway as I so often say, it’s not the subject that finally counts, it’s the way you paint it. It’s also about something visual I’d like to keep, for instance the desert-scene in Pink Table Cloth (Short Shot) (Film Notes) (2013). The long shot and close-up of the curiously isolated Arab-group-with-furniture was exciting, but how to do it in paint was more difficult than a click with a camera. But that gave me something to work with; swapping one art-form for another can be productive, or again, something to work with. And it was, in fact, exciting to paint, especially when finished.

SG

‘Risky’ is not something I set out to do. The risk comes in when you’re not sure whether to leave something or to change it—and this happens all the time. It could be perfectly OK, but could you make it better? And once you’ve painted it out, it could get better, but just as easily get worse. If it is better, when do you stop? That is the precarious bit—where you leave a painting. So often you think it’s ok and finished, but the next day it definitely isn’t. It’s the final judgement which often sits on the ‘knife-edge’: wipe-out, or leave it.

SG

You’ve spoken a bit about your hiatus from painting when your children were young; how do you think that affected your practice? Do you think being away from the studio was also part of the work in some way? 

RW

Being away from the studio was, I think, definitely part of the work: sorting, sifting, looking, thinking...placing yourself in the debate.

SG

Could you talk about the tension between process and finished paintings — between the visible act of making and the feeling the final work leaves the viewer with?

RW

I never knew if the ‘act of making’ (i.e., the whole process) gets anywhere near the viewer. I've often wondered…does it matter? The process is one thing, the finished image is the end-product of what goes before, and that’s what counts. Anyone can run through the process, but it’s the final judgement that it’s finished that is important, including how it started, what to leave, what to change, and HOW to change it.  And that’s what the viewer sees. 

SG

Could you say a bit more about the idea of 'transformation, synthesis and specific'? For example, was there a moment, period or painting that made you realise that this was how your practice worked? 

RW

I’ve always thought ‘transformation’ is the business. Coleridge puts it well: likeness in the unlikeness and unlikeness in the likeness, something like that. Realism can be wonderful, take Ingres’ portraits, for example. But some switch, some new way of saying something we all know, seems to be the thing to get involved with—metaphor, invention (copying is something else). But you need to keep something of the original, and transform it with emphasis perhaps, or ’seeing-as’, useful devices, depending on proportion.

Rose Wylie The Picture Comes First is on view at Royal Academy London until 19 April 2026. Rose Wylie: Henri, Egypt...Bette, Bear is on view at David Zwirner, Paris April 2—May 23, 2026