In Conversation: Maggi Hambling

Maggi Hambling turned 80 a few weeks ago. She celebrated with a party at Larry’s, a bar hidden away under the National Portrait Gallery, and which is thickly smothered in photographs of the great and good. There’s a photo of her on one of its deep red walls, elsewhere it is a rogues’ gallery of celebrities, boozers, mischief-makers, artists, musicians. Some of them her friends, maybe a couple of enemies as well.

Larry’s has just named a cocktail after Maggi, in honour of her birthday. It’s called The Coffin, suitably named for an artist whose work enjoys the explorations of the liminal spaces between life and death. It’s made of Laphroaig whisky, a syrupy reduction of Carlsberg Special Brew, and a little garnish of lemon peel. It goes down too-well during our early morning photoshoot. It was meant to be purely a prop, but it would be rude not to give it a try.

The barman is busy preparing a fresh concoction while Maggi vapes on the terrace outside. She was forced to give up smoking, for the second time, after a heart attack in New York a few years ago. A passerby shouts out: “Are you Maggi Hambling?” Which is a funny thing to say when Maggi Hambling is so obviously, wonderfully, and totally Maggi Hambling. With that shock of grey hair and dark eyeliner she’s got an unmistakable presence, and which could be read as intimidating if she wasn’t so charming. “I admit it,” she shouts back, “I’m Maggi Hambling.”

“I do seem to frighten some people,” she says a few days later. “Which I don’t understand. I’m a softie really.” We’ve moved to her home and studio in South London, to continue the conversation that began at Larry’s, and have switched to cups of tea. The room smells deeply of decades of paint and is stacked high with notebooks, maquettes, finished works in frames, half-completed drawings, canvases packed up ready to be shipped off, canvases on walls, waiting to be finished. We’re here to discuss, predominantly, her exhibition with Sarah Lucas, titled Ooo La La, which is being staged across the Mayfair gallery spaces of Sadie Coles HQ and Frankie Rossi Art Projects, as well as more generally her life and career, which has just been celebrated with an extensive monograph from Rizzoli.

“I do seem to frighten some people. Which I don’t understand. I’m a softie really.”

Maggi and Sarah famously met at the Colony Room in 2000. They share a birthday and were both having their respective parties at the same venue on the same evening. They became friends, growing closer when Sarah relocated to Suffolk, near where Maggi lives, later that decade. They’ve both made portraits, in the broadest sense of that term, of each other in the past, and also exhibited together before, but this represents the largest and closest collaboration between the pair, with both of them acting as curators, and the exhibition reveals the spaces where their ideals of art making and being an artist overlap.

Maggi, a sculpture by Sarah from 2018, is one of the works that will be in the exhibition. It is a toilet bowl suspended on wire, adorned with two light bulbs attached to a clothes hanger. “I was rather surprised when I first saw it,” Maggi says. “I presumed the bulbs were my eyes.” Did Sarah ever explain it? “No! I wouldn’t dream of asking her to explain it,” she laughs. But they’ve done a new series of portraits of each other that will be included, as well as casts of their feet that Sarah made in the studio one day. “I saw a different side of her then,” Maggi says. “She was buzzing around the place, full of energy. I don’t know if they will be in the show, but seeing her working like that is what led to my portrait Sarah at Work.”

Both artists are pioneers and trailblazers in their own ways. Sarah famously as part of the YBAs who riotously overturned and remade much of the British art establishment in the 1990s, and Maggi, whose career stretches back to 1970, and who has become something of an elder stateswoman of the art world, even as she retains something of the mischievous and incendiary enfant terrible.

She retains the hunger, drive and curiosity, she says, of a fifteen-year-old, still incredibly prolific and still demanding of the medium and herself, still able to generate controversy. She’s predominantly right handed, but does a drawing every morning with her left—which is missing the little finger after an accident a few years ago, and which she describes as “full of surprises”—in order to wake her brain up.

“Real time, for me, is in the studio. That’s when I feel alive,” she says, “I don't know if I enjoy it though. ‘Enjoy’ is an odd word. Most of the time it’s doubt and despair. But when the Muse decides to arrive and the painting paints itself, there’s no other feeling like it. I simply paint what life dictates. If I don’t like a painting I’ve made I just throw it away. I cut them up with a Stanley knife first though, so don’t go looking for any free paintings in my rubbish!”

Sarah At Work, which will be in the show, for example, took three goes. The first two being ruthlessly discarded for not being good enough after months of work. The third came together quickly in a morning. “You have to go through all the rubbish first, in order to get something that’s just about all right.” She’s a tough critic of her own work, although jokes that she lives by Shakespearean actor Donald Wolfit maxim: “When he got a good review he’d say: ‘Ah, what an intelligent person,’ and when he got a bad one, ‘Written by one of my enemies.’”

Maggi took up art at fourteen by accident and never stopped. Initially because she was in love with her school’s art teacher, and later, finding she had a talent for it. She studied at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in the early 1960s, before heading to London, to study at Camberwell, and then the Slade. She steadily rose to prominence in the decades that followed. She was artist in residence at the National Gallery in the 80s, and then starred on the TV show Gallery, with friend George Melly, which turned her into a media personality. Her work is held in all of the major British collections and institutions. She’s taught widely in schools now, a state of affairs she finds deeply amusing.

Maggi is best known for three bodies of work: her paintings of dead friends and family, her paintings of the sea, and her controversy-generating public sculptures. Just behind the desk in her studio sits a portrait of her friend Derek Jarman, which she painted just after he died. It sits on a flat body of deep Jarman blue, referencing the film he made, also called Blue, towards the end of his life, when AIDS had rendered him almost blind. “He took so long to die that it was a complete shock when he actually did. He had an enormous influence on me,” she says, and there’s something of the Jarman-esque to her as well: that mixture of tradition and radicalism. Both artists firmly part of the establishment, but also still able to provoke and cause controversy, generate warmth of feeling and devotion, and interrogate the world around them with precision.

“When The Scallop first went up on the Suffolk coast, The Daily Telegraph devoted half a page to demanding it be removed. Now their travel pages run photos of it inviting people to come and eat their fish and chips under it. Funny, isn’t it?”

“I don’t set out to provoke,” she says, “but if something causes a fuss it usually means it’s alive. Sculpture’s different from painting, people have more of a reaction to it because it shares your space. With paintings you can glance at them for thirty seconds and walk away, but sculpture confronts you. When The Scallop first went up on the Suffolk coast, The Daily Telegraph devoted pages of their newspaper to demanding it be removed. Now their travel pages run photos of it inviting people to come and eat their fish and chips under it. Funny, isn’t it? But the Mary Wollstonecraft statue brought out some real viciousness, mostly from feminists, oddly. I had to unplug my phone for a week after that.” Her sculpture of Oscar Wilde, just across the street by Charing Cross Station, welcomes you into Soho, the writer propping himself up out of his coffin-shaped green granite bench, smoking a cigarette. The cigarette was stolen so many times they stopped replacing it. It was also attacked when made, but has grown into something equally well loved. But the painting is almost universally respected. To her it’s all the same, to an extent. A painting of a dead friend in their coffin, a portrait done from life or a photograph, a view of the sea, a sculpture. It’s all about looking.

“No wave resembles another, they’re like leaves and faces, all different. Each wave has to be a portrait of that particular wave. My favourite painter is Rembrandt, and a friend once told me that there is only one recorded statement by Rembrandt from his lifetime: ‘I have painted nothing but portraits.’ Meaning even the smallest painting of a chicken coop is a painting of a particular chicken coop. It’s about a way of seeing the world. For me, every drawing, even every tiny dab of paint, is and must be an experiment. Otherwise it becomes mannered. A painting comes alive, dies, comes back alive, dies again, many times in its making.” Which maybe is where that suspended, beautiful, hovering, delicacy comes from in Maggi’s works, those strange, scrawling and scrabbling movements of paint, struggling at the limit of the flat expanse of canvas.

Maggi says she feels very alive, even at 80, restlessly pushing forward. She doesn’t look back at all, simply waking up each day and painting what life dictates to her. It was interesting though, she says, working on the Rizzoli monograph, looking back on her old paintings, many she hasn’t seen in years, it was like revisiting old friends she doesn’t get to see much anymore.

These thoughts about time and loss naturally lead her to the people she’s painted, and the ways they have continued to inhabit her studio. Whether that’s the portrait of Derek Jarman that she still lives with, years after it was made, or the new composition, just finished and still drying on the wall behind, and which features a cast of people emerging from a landscape, including her old teacher Lett Haines, one of her lovers, Henrietta Moraes, Oscar Wilde, her mobile telephone, and a Lemur that I get told off for mistaking for a squirrel.

When George Melly died she painted him for two years after. Her studio accumulating more and more of his likeness. She sees it as a positive kind of grieving, some form of tender memorial. When they were collected and taken away for an exhibition, she says, that was when she realised she had to face up to the fact that he was actually and truly dead. She’s had friends, jokingly I assume, write in their wills that she is not allowed to make a work of them after they’ve passed. It’s fun to imagine her, Grim Reaper-like, making her way around the corridors of St Thomas’s or Guy’s, sketchbook in hand.

“No wave resembles another, they’re like leaves and faces, all different. Each wave has to be a portrait of that particular wave.”

Jokingly she says too, of how she was always trying to paint her mother when she was alive, and who could never remain still for a sitting until she’d died. “I’ve got you now!” Maggi says, laughing. Her own brush with death, that heart attack in New York, modulated things slightly. “I remember half waking during the operation,” she says. “The medical people were pressing on my chest with their hands, and I simply thought: ‘You’re either going to live or you’re going to die.’ Then I went back into another world. There was none of that life-flashing-before-your-eyes business. I woke up after the operation and I was alive and that was that.”

“I think the only change is that as I’ve got older, I try to say more with less. And of course one thinks about time running out. I’ve always worked hard, but now I put all my energy into my work, because one isn’t forever. Victor Hugo used to get very cross with trees because they can live two or three hundred years. He was furious with them. But if I lived to be as old as that tree outside my studio, well, I couldn’t even tell you what I’m painting next week, let alone in six months or three hundred years. Painting all depends on what happens in life.” Or death.