Artist Trish Wylie’s early paintings inspired by iconic Western movies won her a fan in the form of ex-Royal College of Art Rector Sir Christopher Frayling, who wrote the foreword to an exhibition catalogue and described her as “a big presence on the wall: presence in terms of concept, scale, colour and technique.” While her 2017 solo exhibition ‘I Rose Madder’ at the William Road Gallery in London attracted the attention of Forbes magazine who featured it in their Top 10 Frieze Week highlights. More recently Wylie donated a portrait of screen siren Elizabeth Taylor to the Arms Around the Child fundraising auction whose patron was musician Neneh Cherry. Sadly the auction part had to be put on holiday due to the pandemic, but there are plans for Christie’s to host it in Spring 2021. Her latest series of portraits feature alpha male screen icons including Daniel Craig, Clint Eastwood and Idris Elba, feminised with the application of a smear of vibrant red lipstick, as well as some evocative landscape watercolours painted during a pre-pandemic trip to The Joshua Tree in California.   

I spoke to Wylie as she prepared for her debut at the first virtual Art Car Boot Fair, and we discussed the effect of quarantine on her artistic practice, the liberating experience of The Joshua Tree, and the classic country and western films that inspired her early work.  

Lee Sharrock:  What was the effect of lockdown on you creatively as an artist?  And can you tell me about your pre-lockdown trip to The Joshua Tree? 

Trish Wylie: The lockdown was definitely a positive experience creatively, I was able to go to my studio, as it is within walking distance of where I live, and the quietness and the change felt environmentally, emotionally, psychologically and physically, gave me even more motivation to make work. I think as an artist you are constantly living with uncertainty, and I recognise that is also a key part of life, now as I am older, I recognise the element of uncertainty can be an energising factor. 

The Joshua Tree experience was profound, I had experienced a feeling of the sublime, Alain De Botton explains. " The sublime is a feeling provoked by certain kinds of landscape that are very large, very impressive and dangerous. What lies at the centre of the experience is a feeling of smallness. You are very small and something else is very big and dangerous. You are very vulnerable in the face of something else. It is a feeling that is a recognisable and universal one, and a good one." I found it so liberating, and I understood something of really feeling the land and myself being so deeply connected, I actually felt I had come home!

Lee Sharrock:  Your 2017 solo exhibition ‘I Rose Madder’ at John McAslan + Partners’ William Road Gallery was featured in the Forbes Top 10 Frieze Week exhibitions, with art critic Joanne Shurvell describing your work as a "mash up of Jenny Saville and Cindy Sherman”. Would you say that they are influences?  

Trish Wylie: Absolutely, I have followed their work since way back and I am in awe of them, but actually hadn't recognized their presence in my I Rose Madder Series until Jo Shurvell  cleverly pointed it out, much of the time I am working towards something and as it develops it unfolds, so I guess it is afterwards you may see the connections.

LS: At the start of your career you painted many large scale canvases inspired by iconic western movies by directors such as Sergio Leone and John Ford, and you’ve said before that your obsession with cowboy movies can be traced back to your childhood in the late 50s and early 60s, when your first words were ‘‘GeeGee. Fury Cheyenne. Bang!’ When did you start out as an artist, and were your paintings inspired by movies from the start? 

TW: I really started out as an artist seriously around 1990/1991 I won a couple of prizes which gave me the confidence to do what I really wanted to. My painting went through various stages of practice and for some time I explored a more abstract painting practice, and experimented a lot with various materials, at one time I was making very large encaustic paintings of fingerprints and lip prints. My cinematic western paintings came by surprise to me, and it was those paintings that proved very popular but after some time I wanted to work about other things and actually change the way I work, and I am very excited about the work I have been making over the past four years or so.

LS: Sir Christopher Frayling, Rector of the Royal College of Art from 1996 to 2009, has been a fan of your work since the early stages of your career and said of you: “Trish Wylie takes individual moments from great Western movies – and other movies – not necessarily the best-known ones – and gives them a big presence on the wall: presence in terms of concept, scale, colour and technique.” How did you move from the country and western paintings to the I Rose Madder self-portraits, and your new work that you’re showing at the ACBF? 

TW:  I made the break from the cinematic paintings by making a series of self-portraits of myself dressed as a cowboy, I hired two photographers for two separate photoshoots, not knowing what would come out of them, it was the work with the second photographer Harriet MacSween which really became the basis for the paintings, it was her skill and artistry that really inspired so much of the paintings, we worked together where it was fun, and she drew things out that were revealing. It was great feeling like a child again dressing up at the age of 60, I would suggest it to anyone as a great game to play. Those pictures then led onto the series of collaged and lipstick men that I started to make when I moved into a new studio, which is the best studio I have worked in, and I felt liberated, the light comes entirely from above through a glass roof, the walls are high and have no windows, plenty of space to put your work on. I wanted to look then at the anima in some famous men,

I had already a series of pastel drawings I had made in my previous studio, and it was when I was sorting out my work from the move, that I put them up and then put the fluorescent paint on their mouths as lipstick that the idea just rapidly moved on from there. Not long after completing those I left for California to say with my daughter who is a producer and married to a cinematographer, and had my life changing experience of a solo stay in the Mojave Desert, since then I have been obsessed with Joshua Trees, Mojave Desert and nature.

The long-held love of westerns and fantasy of the cowboy myth magnified the intensity of my feelings for the place, but I almost felt like I had been there before, and painting my watercolours plein air so connected me and also freed me, as watercolour painting like that is a fast and exciting experience, I will have giclée prints on offer of those paintings but I will not be selling the originals, they are too precious to me, as I don't know when I will be going again because of Covid-19 etc...... The watercolours though have led to me working on a much larger scale with watercolour on canvas, as they are traditionally associated with landscape painting and are also less pollutant than other paints.

LS:  Where do you paint, how do you start on a new canvas, what technique do you use, and do you work on one painting at a time or have several projects on the go at once?  

My studio is opposite Acton Park, and I work on maybe four or five large pieces at once, stretching canvas on the floor to paint the large watercolours and then putting them on the wall, I paint often listening to music to get me in the right place, and have all my watercolours ready in little pots, and paint largely from memories of the landscape, but referencing some of the watercolours, and photography I took in California. My walls are covered in small watercolours, large water- based paintings, and photography.

LS:  In your new series of portraits of male screen icons including Daniel Craig, Idris Elba, Clint Eastwood, Tom Hardy and The Rock, you have applied red lipstick to their mouths.  Can you explain why? 

TW: The lipstick on these men is a continuation of my interest in the anima and animus in us, the female and male parts of our psyches, and as red lipstick is such a strong symbol of modern femininity, I used it as a very direct signal that transformed these men, along with the rose collaging, with roses having multi layered meanings about love friendship, and secrecy and confidentiality. I wanted to give these images a decorative rich look, because men are often shown in stripped down hard line un fussy imagery, and it was an act of adding to, rather than taking away, which I wanted to explore.” 

Trish Wylie is exhibiting in the first digital Art Car Boot Fair on Sunday 20th September between 12 – 6pm: www.artcarbootfair.com

http://trishwylie.co.uk