08 March 2022

Inimitable Rose Wiley
















"Wife and servant are the same,
  But only differ in the name:"
    - Lady Mary Chudleigh (1656-1710), from "To The Ladies"

"for better for worse divorce is always stressful but..."

Rose Wiley's paintings have an exuberance that, once seen, is unforgettable. Her sources cut a broad swath through visual media - and from every period in art history - greeting cards, comics, magazines and newspapers, film stills.  She combines figures and texts from these and other sources, creating new stories .she calls "personal visual diary-making." 

The genesis of Lords And Ladies was ab article about a divorce that appeared in The Guardian newspaper. A bride stand on a wedding cake while her husband flees the scene. He is modeled on Philip IV of Spain as he appeared in a portrait made nu 1620 by Rodrigo de Villandrando. (in the collection of the Prado in Madrid). The lettering for the bride's words forms a lattice pattern whiles Philip's title looks like a signature

Wylie usually paints by placing an upstretched canvas on her studio floor. This enables her to make gestural brushwork that makes for an improvisational feel to her work.

Rose Wiley was born in Kent, England in 1934.  She graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in 1981, although she had studied at the Folkston School of Art in the 1950s. Like many women of her generation, Wiley was sidetracked from her career when she married a fellow artist and raised three children. 

Image: Rose Wiley - Lords And Ladies,  2008, oil on canvas, National Museum of Woman in the Arts, Washington, DC.

No comments: