Rebel yell

Roaring into her 90s, isnow sought after by galleries worldwide and her wild, witty paintings fetch huge sums. Melissa Denes visited her studio

- 

THE ROYAL ACADEMY is billing Rose Wylie as a "rebel artist" for her new show and at 92, she finds there's still a lot to rebel against. An establishment that has long underrated women's work, for one: astonishingly, hers is the first solo show by a British woman to occupy all the academy's main galleries. Being pigeonholed is another: her giant canvases - with their bold colours, painted texts and wild juxtapositions (Nicole Kidman meets ancient Egypt at a Kent community centre) - have been compared to the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Philip Guston. But she does not identify with any one movement and dislikes art that is "up your arse".

For more than 60 years now, Wylie has lived in her lowslung, 17th-century house in Sittingbourne, Kent, where she rebels against conventional domesticity. Jasmine grows in a tangle through the kitchen ceiling. A ceramic horse given to her by the actor James Norton, a collector, lies by the windowsill. Next to the sink, two plates of petrified cakes are fuzzy with cobwebs. "I bought that biscuit in Costa two years ago," says Sara, who works at Wylie's London gallery, pointing to one of them. She thinks there's a Battenberg buried somewhere upstairs in the studio.

It would be rude and wrong to describe the house as a mess. There are extraordinary amounts of stuff, but it is clean and tidy, because though Wylie lives alone she loves a visitor. Logs burn in an open fireplace, and she compliments the colour of my tights. She likes clothes - "the nearest people get to painting and sculpture in their everyday lives" - and was recently photographed here by Juergen Teller for a Loewe campaign.