May 12, 2022 33Wylie uses several different ways of
applying paint. In addition to the cake
knife and the scumble, there are the
wavering, overpainted line, the chunky
block letters built out of short strokes,
and what looks like flicking paint off
the edge of a palette knife, with thick
globs hitting the canvas here and there.
Her other device is the overpainted
outline that gives definition to her
otherwise approximate figures, and to
details like hair and clothes and other
accoutrements.
The important part—one wants to
say the art part—is that all of Wylie’s
lines and marks and paint drags are
also shapes. This is the first principle
of painting, and Wylie takes it to heart.
Then she explodes it. She also has the
great gift of knowing when to stop.
Wylie’s way of using a paintbrush to
describe form is direct and unfussy,
but achieving that effect is more com-
plicated than it looks. The unarguable,
gutsy outlines are the end point of a
process of remembering and refining.
I gather that her method is something
like this: she sees an image in a mag-
azine or on TV, say of a tennis match,
and then, days or weeks later, makes
charcoal drawings of it from memory,
deliberately letting time go by so that
only the essentials remain. The draw-
ing is the sum of specific details that
stay in the mind’s eye after the original
image has faded. These drawings, re-
worked and reanimated, sometimes cut
up and collaged together, then form the
basis for the paintings.
This translation from memory to
drawing is one of the factors that give
Wylie’s work its sense of freedom; the
forms, though inspired by something
pictured in the media, seem to spring
directly from her head. Straight, ob-
servational realism is for wimps. She
doesn’t worry about things like shoul-
ders or necks when painting her figures,
and especially not hands (why bother?);
arms are like strands of pulled taffy that
end in narrowed stumps, sometimes
with only the slightest nubs for fingers.
Legs are like Gumby dolls, or hams,
or tadpoles; and feet are either impres-
sively shod or appear as small triangles.
You can imagine her unapologetic inner
monologue while painting: Oh, did I
forget to give that person a shoulder? I
didn’t think he needed one. Wylie is not
painting a person in any case, but her
memory of a picture of a person. Nev-
ertheless, in the alchemy of paint, her
figures are full of personality: they kick
and leap and fly around the canvas.
Sometimes her paintings feature
preposterously enlarged views of quo-
tidian reality. Breakfast (2020) is a ten-
foot- long rectangle in two parts that
features a white plate with a blue scal-
loped rim floating on a mostly black
background. On the plate rests an
enormous black spoon, a rectangle of
scumbled gold- orange paint (yogurt?
porridge? toast?) and a few berries
scattered around. The scaling up of an
intimate domestic image, painted with
the finesse of a road crew laying down
asphalt, is mind- expanding. It’s as if
Bonnard had taken a tab of acid with
his morning café au lait and suddenly
picked up a three- inch- wide brush in-
stead of his habitual quarter- inch fil-
bert. Yet even when she is slathering
on great globs of paint, her touch stays
purposeful and light.
Wylie often incorporates the titles
into her compositions, either with cap-
ital letters of thick impasto (Break-fast) or with an elongated, condensed
typeface, like the kind used for elegant
moderne stationery in the 1930s and
1940s (Fluffy Head, 2020). The im-
pulse to write on paintings, to make de-
sign elements out of letters and words,
has shown up periodically in Western
art for over a century, but Wylie makes
it feel new. In Breakfast, the title is
spelled out in caps in broad, semicare-
ful brushstrokes of raw sienna along the
bottom edge on the black ground. The
scale is declarative, like someone shout-
ing into a megaphone. The big blocky
letters are also kind of slapstick, like a
pratfall or a poke in the eye. Get it?Wylie’s belief in her own choices is
bracing; she calls to mind Frank O’Ha-
ra’s d ic t u m “ You ju st go on you r ner ve.”
On first glance her paintings may ap-
pear to be blown- up drawings made by
a blithely unselfconscious child. In the
next instant, their deliberateness and
formal sophistication swamp that ini-
tial impression; every mark and color
and wonky bit of drawing is fueled by
a decisive engagement with painting,
carried out with a disregard for the
conventions of representation. She fits
the late artist and film critic Manny
Farber’s description of the “termite
artist”: an efficient and unconcerned
omnivore tunneling under the surface
of things (or on the surface, in this
case), taking only what she can use and
discarding the rest.
Wylie’s concern is for the way we
experience the world as a series of still
pictures, often in close- up, and how
those pictures can be bigger and more
persuasive than the real thing. She’s a
twenty- first- century painter of modern
life, an “I am a camera” with a brush.
With their distilled forms and self-
captioned texts- as- titles, Wylie’s pic-
tures are like memes in paint. But none
of this ontological filigree would matter
very much if it weren’t for her ability
to orchestrate the formal elements of
painting into an indivisible whole. Her
gift for making an overlooked bit of
cultural signage into a surprising image
is combined with an uncanny sense of
where and how to place it within the
overall composition; she deploys her
mnemonic distillations with a collag-
ist’s sense of mobile improvisation.
Both aspects of her art—the noticing
and the arranging—are underscored
by a tremendous freedom to bend the
image to her subjectivity, to cut it up
and move it around on the canvas at
will, and finally to combine it with frag-
ments of ornamentation or other bits of
painterly derring- do. Her motto could
be “Amuse thyself,” and her method
summed up as “improvise, then re-
vise.” Her work is a good example of
the absolute specificity and the in- the-
moment control necessary to make a
painting rise above the predictable.
Wylie is also something of a sponge.
The list of artists with whom she inter-
sects, visually or spiritually, goes all
the way back to the Egyptians. She’s
attracted to how artists working be-
fore the invention of perspective used
highly stylized, static figures in rhyth-
mic sequences to convey continuity and
movement, and Byzantine and early
Renaissance paintings are echoed in
her hierarchies of scale and placement.
Skipping ahead a few centuries, Wylie
shows fellow feeling for Francis Picabia,
that other master of the overdeliberate
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