Dolce vita / My wild house parties with Rose Wylie |
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna
I rang up my old best friend, Luke-John, for a chat a few days ago and to ask him about his mum, Rose Wylie. She is 91 and this week becomes the first ever female painter to be given a solo show at the Royal Academy.
When I was in my late teens and early twenties, her house in the village of Newnham, near Faversham, became a safe haven for me, and I used to stay there a lot. Rose and her husband Roy, who was also an artist and died in 2014, were just so dead cool. Neither was well-known, and they had little money, but they were seriously intellectual, seriously stylish and seriously good-looking. He had been to Goldsmiths and then been a student of David Bomberg’s at the Borough Polytechnic, and was doing a PhD on him at the Royal College of Art.
Roy and Rose were not dangerous in any obvious way, as creative people often are
Roy and Rose were not dangerous in any obvious way, as creative people often are
She had been to Goldsmiths too, where they had met and within two weeks married. Roy and Rose were not dangerous in any obvious way, as creative people often are, but they did encourage me to see things differently, which can be fatal. Yet they did not make me feel hopeless, just hopeful. They were such decent, unpushy people and therefore the........