Rose Wylie @ Chapter Gallery, Cardiff

Rose Wylie was UK’s representative at Women to Watch in 2012.  Her pictures are bold, occasionally chaotic, often unpredictable, and always fiercely independent, without being domineering.
Wylie works directly on to large unprimed, un-stretched canvases and her inspiration comes from many and varied sources, most of them popular and vernacular. The cutout techniques of collage and the framing devices of film, cartoon strips and Renaissance panels inform her compositions and repeated motifs. Often working from memory, she distils her subjects into succinct observations, using text to give additional emphasis to her recollections.
Wylie borrows from first-hand imagery of her everyday life as well as films, newspapers, magazines, and television allowing herself to follow loosely associated trains of thought, often in the initial form of drawings on paper. The ensuing paintings are spontaneous but carefully considered: mixing up ideas and feelings from both external and personal worlds.