For Lovers of Art and Travelers at Heart -Spring 2026
Singin’ in the Rain
Me outside the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain. September, 2025.
Hello, Art and Travel Lover,
I hope you’re doing well and enjoying the bounties of spring. Everywhere I look, plants and trees sprout brilliant green leaves while flowers flaunt rainbows of color. It’s such a hopeful time of year.
Recently, my buoyant spring spirits got an extra boost from watching The Singers on Netflix, a mini movie so uplifting that it inspired the title of this newsletter—Singin’ in the Rain. This little eighteen-minute movie won the 2026 Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film—a well-deserved honor if you ask me.
Also, my friend Romalyn Tilghman recently published her second novel, The Obit Habit, a thought-provoking and inspirational tale that helps us see life as an opportunity to make a difference, another heartfelt mood enhancer.
Both the film and the book are great examples of how important the arts can be for lifting our spirits. They can help us focus on our humanity, even in the midst of inhumanity.
So, my goal for this short newsletter is to inspire us all to keep singin’ in the rain!
Giving Voice to the Narrative
Click HERE to listen to a sample from the audiobook
Adhering to the literal sense of this newsletter’s goal—to use our voices to lift our spirits—I’m thrilled to announce that my novel, The Art of Traveling Strangers, has been produced as an audiobook and will be available soon.
Whoo-Hoo!
It was an interesting challenge to select the narrator from ten auditioners, but in the end, there was one resonant voice, Camrie Fletcher’s, that captured my imagination. Working with her was a pleasure and a surprise as I listened to my words being spoken from her perspective.
The audiobook will soon be available for download from all your favorite sites (Audible, Spotify, Kobo, Google Play). I’ll keep you posted.
You can also click on the link below to sign up for an official notification from the publisher—Audiobook Release—and a chance to win a free Audible copy.
https://www.audiobookrelease.com/comingsoonaudiobooks/the-art-of-traveling-strangers
ROSE WILEY:
“ not light-hearted . . . not decorative . . . not girly.”
Rose Wylie by Fatima Khan. Artworks © Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner. a-rabbitsfoot.com
Continuing with the uplifting theme of this newsletter, I thought I’d share what I’ve been learning about the artist Rose Wylie—a truly inspirational, indefatigable powerhouse. A woman who has always done it her own way and is finally getting the recognition she deserves.
Born in 1934, the seventh of seven children, Rose was accustomed to fighting for what she wanted. In college, all the artists were men, and they dismissed her as a woman who would just “get married and have children.” But this didn’t seem to faze her.
“Remember, I was the youngest, so I was used to people bossing me about, not listening to a word I said. I was negligible, just a cog, a student who’d be giving up anyway. So no, I didn’t mind.”
She also claims she didn’t mind that she never got recognized as an artist until her mid-seventies. But that’s harder for me to swallow. She says that working in obscurity gave her the freedom to do whatever she felt like doing. I can see that, but I have the feeling she would have done what she wanted anyway, based on the rest of her story.
While enrolled in art school in the fifties, her portrait, painted by Anthony Devas, became one of about twenty oil paintings of women chosen to relaunch the British chocolate candy, Aero, after sugar rationing finally ended at the close of World War II.
Aero advert, 1956. Ref: R/Guardbooks/W20. Borthwick Institute for Archives. By permission of Nestlé UK.
Although the portrait in the ad above shows a very traditional-looking young woman—she was 21 at the time—Rose describes herself as a rebellious art student, cutting up her clothes to refashion them and scraping the color off her leather shoes.
“I put white over my face, and yellow all over my hair. I was unusual, an early punk.”
As outlandish as she might have been as an art student, she was traditional when it came to marriage and her three children. She willingly traded in her paintbrushes for child-rearing.
“People often say to me, do I feel angry because I didn’t paint while my husband did? But the answer is no, because I think children are important and that you have to be available and to talk to them, and if you paint, you can’t. You want to get back to your painting, so the children become a nuisance, an irritation, marginalised, and I didn’t want to do that . . .”
Returning to art school in her forties and graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1981, Wiley remained in the shadows for decades.
“I think being left out, being excluded for years and years and years was a bit… it was a bit of a shame,” she said. “People used to look at my paintings and go ‘uh huh.’”
Wiley even suggested to a curator once that a proposed exhibit of her works be named “Uh-huh-huh.” But the curator nixed it.
So, despite her statement that she didn’t mind being ignored as an artist until her mid-seventies, that doesn’t seem entirely true. What does seem true, though, is her ability to roll with the punches and never give up.
Wiley’s cottage, her home for over fifty years, is a couple of hours from London. Her upstairs studio is packed with discarded furniture, paint tins, and glue sticks. The paint-splattered floor is littered with old newspapers, which serve to clean her brushes. She calls this scattered debris her source material.
Although some might wonder how she could possibly work in such disorder, she explains the state of her studio as simply a matter of practicality.
“I don’t want to be caught up in the idea that you must tidy up, which is what you get as a child . . . When my paint tin is empty, I just throw it on the pile. Sometimes, if you have a very clean, sterile working situation, it takes time to keep it like that . . . For me, the paints are already out. I can come in and just start working.”
NK (Syracuse Line-Up)’, 2014, Rose Wylie
Painting bold, raw images on mostly large, unprimed canvases, Wiley draws from memory—things that stick with her from films, books, news reports, ads, sports, art history, and personal experience. With such diverse inspiration, her paintings often present a curious mixture (or collision) of ideas and images.
The above painting, NK (Syracuse Line-up), is a good example of her work. The canvas is about six-and-a-half feet high by ten feet long and depicts a sequence of simplistic figures inspired by Nicole Kidman, or NK, on the red carpet.
Nicole Kidman, Academy Awards dress, 2012. Getty Images.
But the painting’s name also includes the words “Syracuse Line-Up,” a mysterious addition until Rose explains it.
“That refers to a marvellous, ancient double-banked frieze of women playing instruments, pipes of some sort. So that’s what she’s holding . . .”
Roman Art, Woman playing double flute ‘Aulos’, Relief, Detail of sarcophagus, Vatican Museums, City of the Vatican. (Photo by Prisma/UIG/Getty Images)
Okay, so the “Syracuse Line-up” in the title refers to artwork from ancient Greco/Roman times when the Sicilian city of Syracuse was a political powerhouse. Friezes, like the one Rose recalls, often depicted women in celebratory processions. See the connection now?
In this painting, Rose creates a visual link between two wildly disparate sources—one contemporary and one ancient. She associates repeated paparazzi-like images celebrating Nicole Kidman on the red carpet with the line-up of female musicians in ancient celebratory friezes. She blends a popular modern ritual with a popular historical one.
Suddenly, this simple, childlike painting invites reflection on the continuum of life and the common threads that unite us all with the past.
Frieze of the Parthenon, Panathenaic Procession, the Ergastines (young women chosen to weave a sacred robe for the goddess Athena), 445-438 BCE. Louvre Museum, Paris.
Repetition is a favorite technique for Rose. Her use of it in NK (Syracuse Line-Up) not only suggests a kinship with ancient processional imagery but also serves to explore movement and different views of the figure, aligning her works with comic strips and the nineteenth-century photographs of Eadweard Muybridge, a pioneer in stop-motion photography.
Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, Plate 306, 1887.
Rose also uses repetition to intensify the visual impact of her work. She’s much more interested in the power of an image than its realistic accuracy.
“All the early Renaissance people like Giotto and Fra Angelico—I think they’re great . . . They do strong images and they’re not bound by European notions of skill. It’s closer to antiquity, closer to children, closer to comics.”
Indian Bird, 2013. Courtesy the artist, Union Gallery, and David Zwirner, New York/London
The above image is one of my favorites. It beautifully illustrates her love of children’s art and her desire to embrace their unencumbered aesthetic.
“I’ve always liked children’s painting and untaught artists . . .They are doing something real for them.”
And that’s exactly what Wiley’s doing—something real for herself. She never allows her own work to become too “skillful” or refined. Her compositions include messy written notes, blotches of pigment, erasures, and glued-on scraps of paper. Nothing too elegant or precious. She refers to her creative process as “poetic transformation” rather than “a slavish copy.”
I think poetic transformation is a spot-on description of Rose’s art. Like a poet, she uses metaphors, similes, rhyme (repetition), and symbolism to evoke powerful meaning and emotion in her art.
Lilith and Gucci Boy, 2024. DIPTYCH. © Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Let’s take a look at another provocative Wiley painting. It’s one of her more recent works (2024) and one of her largest. The piece (seen above) covers an entire wall in her studio and includes extra strips of canvas at the bottom. Wiley explains the added strips as an obvious necessity.
“I couldn’t fit his feet.”
She calls the “he” in this painting “Gucci boy,” a current-day fashion model. To his left is Lilith, the first wife of Adam, who chose to leave Eden because she was treated as his inferior. Once again, an interesting blend of past and present.
The legend of Lilith is rooted in folklore and mysticism, stretching back to ancient Mesopotamia, where she began as the Queen of Night. Lilith has also been seen as a winged spirit or a scheming demon, depending on the source.
Burney Relief (Queen of the Night), Mesopotamian terracotta plaque, Old-Babylonian, 19th-18th cent. BCE. British Museum
“She’s a smashing subject, and she’s been whitewashed, because history, scripture, the whole stuff, it’s been written by men . . .”
“I think that’s why I liked her—Lilith. I think she’s terrific. Made at the same time as Adam, made from the same clay as Adam and was banished from Eden by Adam, or left by herself, because she was not submissive. It’s quite a story.”
It sounds a bit like Rose’s own story. Don’t you think?
Rose says she was introduced to Lilith by Anselm Kiefer in Wim Wenders 2023 documentary film, Anselm. For Kiefer, Lilith is a symbol for all the powerful historical women who were mythologized by men and transformed into demons.
(If you like Anselm Kiefer or are just curious about him, Wim Wenders’ film is excellent. And, if you want to learn more, you can also check out my previous newsletter article: Anselm Kiefer, La Ribaute, Foundation Eschaton, Barjac, France.)
So, in the Lilith and Gucci Boy painting, we see another fascinating collision of ideas and images. With modern superficiality personified by the male fashion model and ancient power asserted by Lilith, a woman, this painting presents a thought-provoking, stereotype-breaking, in-your-face message. Rose Wiley’s rebellious spirit is clearly alive and well.
Pink Skater (Will I Win, Will I Win), 2015, by Rose Wylie.
Photograph courtesy Jari Lager. Photo: Soon-Hak Kwon © Rose Wylie Rose Wiley
This provocative, never-say-die, ninety-one-year-old artist is the first female British painter to get a solo show in the Royal Academy’s main galleries.
To really appreciate the significance of this, you need to know that the British Royal Academy of Art is 257 years old. It’s about time!
Rose’s show, The Picture Comes First, opened on Feb 28, 2026, and will be up until April 19.
For more information on Rose Wiley, check out:
https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/aia-reviews/rose-wylie-2-62467/
https://a-rabbitsfoot.com/editorial/art-photography/rose-wylie-at-home/
https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/rose-wylie-artist-painter-interview-studio-zwirner-gallery-2023
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crrn1qgdkdlo
https://artlyst.com/rose-wylie-interview-of-the-month-march-2026-paul-carey-kent/
Thanks for joining me.
Until next time, ~Zoe