The Talks
Rose Wylie: “If it works, it works”
Ms. Wylie, looking at photos of your studio is an almost overwhelming experience — but the jumble of materials seems to inspire you. Would you say you thrive in chaos?
(Laughs) I’ve been in my studio some years, and stuff really accumulates; books, wine bottles, paintings, brushes… I’ve been wiping a brush off on the windows for years, so it looks like there’s a painting on the window, but there isn’t! Many years ago, I started working on the floor, and for me, that was very liberating. You walk on your canvases and it becomes a mess, and so do your feet. You become involved, you’re really in it — not just standing there looking at it, but really standing in the work. You can walk across it, you can work upside down, you can pour the paint directly onto the canvas and it won’t trickle off.
How did you discover that unique way of working?
I don’t plan very well, so I would often run out of space for my pieces on the wall. On the floor, you can just keep on extending. Somehow I’ve always felt like easels belonged to another time… I wanted to get away from anything to do with easels, or prepared canvases, or clean, white, primed bought canvases. I don’t stretch them, I work with them either on the floor or I just staple them on the walls, across cupboards and radiators to make more space. You can store them much more easily this way, too, and they cost less money. I think it was lack of space, lack of money, lack of everything, really, that made me do it.
“I just want to do everything as good as I possibly can but it is also good to act on an idea and fail — and then you get something out of it. I think it’s really important to not be afraid of failure and to push yourself to try things and jump in the cold water.”
“Art is something about everyday life. Art is about finding creativity in the normal gutter next to you. To see the potential in something where there is no potential is often where art or creativity is a great tool. It’s about making the impossible possible.”
“You’re always looking for a second chance. You’re always looking to do a little bit better than you did the last time. And you hope that the readers will stay with you.”
“I just keep imagining myself thirty years from now thinking, ‘Why didn’t you take advantage of all the opportunities you had? Look at all the people you could have worked with, the roles you could have done. Go for it.’ And that’s what I am thinking.”
“Right now we are 40 people working in Osteria Francescana, for 28 or 30 covers a night. So, it’s totally the opposite of a business. You cannot survive with that. But we believe in those kinds of dreams and so I keep investing, and reinvesting, and reinvesting.”
“Failure is just something you have to go through on your own. Nothing can prepare you for it, just like a broken heart. I thought about folding, but I’m not a quitter. I’m not going to quit.”
“The more experience you have, the more time you’ve spent on this earth, the more regrets you accumulate. It’s normal. You can’t do everything right, nobody’s perfect. But if you think too much about that, you’re not here. You have to make some efforts to stay open-minded.”
“If people don’t like the pictures, I don’t care. To me, there’s only one point of view: that’s mine.”
“I have a tattoo that goes around my right wrist that looks like barbed wire, but it’s actually ANDAND linked together, which stands for “A New Dawn, A New Day.” It’s about waking up every day knowing that you have a chance to start again and forgive and be forgiven and to let go of yesterday.”
“Any kind of quest for achievement has some kind of a personal drive behind it. I'm sure some people would say that it's obviously about the ego, but on the other hand, it's not as if I'm competing against anybody. It's not as if I'm trying to outdo anybody. It's just me trying to do something to see if I can.”
“Wherever any of us have been wounded, if we dive into what those wounds are, if we go down into and do the hard work within those wounds, we’ll actually find ourselves, we’ll find our real giftedness, a sincere, true giftedness.”
“In your life there’s a moment when the door opens and you need to walk through the door then. You can’t say then, “Well, I’ll go through it two years from now. I’ll do it, I’ll save up some money...” Because by then the door will be closed.”
“I don’t want to be good. I want to be the best. Even in failing that, you’ll hit a higher mark than if you never tried.”
“I think when you’re an artist who’s been around for a while like I have you understand that it’s almost impossible to make work that is unanimously loved or understood! You can’t please everyone, and that is a great realization.”
“The truth. The whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God. And that’s it! May it be ugly, may it be beautiful, may it be perverse, may it be all of those things. That’s it, I can’t lie; it is what it is, unabashed, naked. I expect that of myself, that’s for sure.”
“I think the key to having a successful career is to find the thing you do well and do it again and again for the rest of your life. But I’m interested in expanding my language as an artist and as a composer. And I try to expand it with every project.”
“It’s been a lot harder than I thought it was going to be to make the films I really dream of making. It’s heartbreaking when that happens, but it’s all okay. It requires patience.”
“If you have to defend something that you like, it makes you to like it even more. My parents hated the comic strips, they hated rock ‘n’ roll, and when they found out what movies I was going to they also were against that. So everything I loved I had to defend.”
“Architecture is the oddest profession. In the beginning you're very much involved in finding your voice and locating yourself artistically. For 25 years you're working with small projects, domestic projects. And then you mature at 50 and you're given your first projects.”
“I think it’s so good to try new things and open the window and let some fresh air in and try to eliminate any regrets.”
“If I knew that tomorrow a meteorite would destroy our planet, I would start shooting a new film today.”
“I think as you are growing up, deciding what you want to do is really the process of elimination rather than gravitating towards something until you land on what really makes you happy.”
“My work is integrated completely into my life and vice-versa – I’ve been working since I was sixteen and my work is my life and my life is my work. It made me who I am.”
“I follow the beat of my own drum. I think I’ve gotten more confident and self-trustful in my ability and my natural appetite for play, and not over-adorning it with anything. I’ve always been disciplined and I’m still nothing if not conscientious.”
“I always say ideas drive the boat. Ideas are a huge, huge blessing. That’s the thing you try to catch – an idea that you fall in love with. The whole thing doesn’t come at once, but fragments of things come and these fragments form themselves into a script. It’s a process.”
“Being creative and keeping your brain occupied is very sensible because if you don’t you die, slowly. Sometimes I feel tired and think I ought to give it up, I don’t want to just retire. I enjoy it all.”
“You have to open yourself. Just as in life you have to be open to other people, to other perspectives — it’s the same thing when you write. That’s what religion’s about, that’s what literature’s about, it’s what life’s about: the stories that you build.”
“I always try to concentrate on the process and where the real goal is, which is trying to get up every day and be the best possible version of myself and do the best work I can do.”
“I’m trying to not play it safe. I learn more when I fail than when I succeed, so if I push myself to do something that’s really difficult, I could fail and I’ll learn a lot. But if I don’t fail, then I’ll be in a great movie. I hope to be the kind of actor that isn’t always great.”
“Failure is more interesting. Success only comes in one form. It doesn’t teach you anything. Failure kind of comes in all sorts of ways, and teaches you all sorts of things. You learn by failing.”
“I’m doing things more personally than ever before because that’s what my project is based on, that’s who I am and I have never been this happy my whole life — but it was a long road to get here.”
“Belief is very important. It’s like when you are riding a horse and you want it to go to the left, you look to the left first and then pull the horse’s head. As a human being it is the same thing: wherever you put your attention is probably where you are going to find yourself.”
“I think every person who is curious is more fascinating, and exploration is a big part of that. If you know everything in advance, if you're too self-confident, then everything will stop at some point.”
“When I was younger I had these moments where I was surprising myself with my spontaneity, and I thought, ‘This is what you should be chasing.’ The cerebral part of acting and the perfectionism can be exhausting, but the spontaneity can be very joyful.”
“I never thought of art as a career. I thought it was more like a monastic practice. It is something that you do – you can't not do it. If I made money doing it, I would do it; if I didn't make any money, I would do it. Obviously I’m not perfect but the thing I am best at is painting.”
“I try not to look back. I’m looking forward. I’m worried more about what I’m going to do next week than I am what I did last week. There are too many things to do. Looking back is for everybody else.”
“I’ve been very lucky — I took the risk to do the things that interested me, so I could have no possible complaints. There’s nothing else I could ask for, really, and if I drop dead tomorrow, I would have had a terrific time.”
“I think my love of pushing the boundaries in film comes from my desire as a kid to do something artistic that would amaze people. I wanted to do nothing less than that. Those are the projects that I love: figuring out what might just be possible but hasn't been done yet.”
“As I began to take risks, leaving my very comfortable and secure job and taking this first leap into fashion, every subsequent risk became easier to take because I began to see the kind of opportunity and excitement that risk-taking offered.”
“I think you have to slow down a little bit. But I am just trying to make work; I am just out there making work. I take care of myself so that I can survive. I used to not take care of myself so well, but now I do.”
Emerging MastersGenesis Owusu: “I’ve always known who I am”
Kofi, how much do you think about the future in terms of your creative process?
You know, I was very much about the whole futurism thing when my track Sideways came out in like 2017. And it was very literal back then, I was inspired by sci-fi and video games set in the future. And of course, everything I do is a culmination of what's come before me, characters like Prince and Andre 3000 who I take cues from… But now, I feel like for the most part, I’m in the present — but it's my present. I'm at a place where with everything that I'm doing, I'm trying to make it so unique to me that the time period doesn't matter. This could have happened a thousand years in the past or a thousand years in the future. It's totally in its own space, devoid of time.
Apparently it both terrifies and bores you to make music you already know you’re good at.
Yeah, I just like to keep moving. I like to keep everyone on their toes, including me. I feel like as soon as people get comfortable with me, or with a certain thing that I'm doing, then it becomes an expectation. And since childhood, I’ve always hated when people place any kind of expectation on me because I feel like with those expectations comes boundaries. If a boundary is set, and I do something outside of that, then people will be disappointed, regardless of how cool that thing might be. So I wanted to make sure that people could never safely put a boundary around me by just keeping it moving at all times.
