ROSE WYLIE

Surprised to find myself somewhat irritated at the Imagine programme about Rose Wylie her work seemed extremely derivative of Philip Guston, of her husband, Roy Oxlade,  of Jean-Michel Basquiat,  if she wasn't upper middle class but a dauber from Hull would she be famous? 

I am known for my tolerance and indeed acceptance of all things modern and adored the work of most of the BritPop gang and still do but then why did this grate so much? Is it the zeitgeist aspect of the emperor's new clothes element that seems so inescapable? The next big thing with the hip stars queuing to be seen with her? 

Rose Wylie with Stewart Lee

Rose Wylie compares fists with Russel Tovey

Nothing new here. She could paint early on and now chooses not to. Guston's decision to change to something more personally honest, beer glasses, fag butts was a reaction to the testosterone fuelled pomposity of the American Abstract Expressionists 

Basquiat sketch

Roy Oxlade

Roy Oxlade

Roy Oxlade

I am minded of the apocryphal story that I may have misremembered but it stuck with me for some reason that the criteria RB Kitaj gave his fellow students, paint what is important to you, what is around you, your personal landscape if you will. Dine painted Tools and clothes and Hockney painted landscapes and people, while Wylie paints films and television themes, football for pity's sake animals any rubbish that happens to be on the telly. So what? It is someone else's creativity. Yellow Football Kit. Kill Bill. Nicole Kidman. Is it important? No.

"Peter Crouch is very tall. Wayne Rooney isn't the normal footballer shape." R Wylie

Russian oligarchs loaned paintings to her recent shows. So it's about money.

For me personally, while an honest style, that is common, the answer was always the human clay, us, ourselves and in absence of that source the 'other' then oneself. The human existence will always out. Television I think not. 

Draw the selfie! The self portrait . Always relevant in that it is US. What is Wylie's work but the portrayal of irrelevance, surface matters of little to no consequence. None.

A snake over several panels? Oh a snake is longer than it is thin. Meaning? None.