MAGGI HAMBLING

Words Belle Hutton  Photographs Julian Broad

Originally published in No 13

“Laughing is a very serious business. It’s the only thing that makes life possible,” Maggi Hambling tells me with a glint in her eye when we meet at her house and studio in Clapham, South London. She has returned to laughter throughout her decades-long career, since first painting late British artist Lett Haines, her teacher and mentor, laughing in the 1970s. The loss of control that true laughter incites, transforming the face into something almost grotesque, captivates her. “I love the chaos. You can’t present any kind of image to the world when you’re really laughing: the face is in chaos, and it’s almost a sexual thing too. The total abandonment.” This kind of complex tension appears throughout Hambling’s paintings and sculptures, oscillating between chaos and control, freedom and restrictions, life and death, laughing and crying. She is one of Britain’s greatest and most prolific living artists, steadfast in defending her sometimes controversial works, and often described as fierce, but Hambling loves to laugh.

A series of laughing portraits featured in her most recent London show, 2020, at the Mayfair gallery Marlborough, staged to coincide with her 75th birthday in October. Lockdowns and Coronavirus restrictions threatened to halt the exhibition, but it went ahead, and those laughing works, alongside a series of animal paintings, self-portraits, and seascapes, proved something of a tonic amid the turbulence of the past year. Hambling addressed that mayhem in new works: Self portrait (angry), 2020, and Covid Spring, 2020, spoke to the universal confusion and frustration that played out. “Nobody knew what was happening,” she says. “The dichotomy of the spring all bursting around us, and this hovering thing encroaching on our lives from every angle.”

Her process remained the same, and Hambling, who needs to work every day or else she’ll “go pottier than ever,” worked through the pandemic (cigarette, as always, in hand). “I get up very early in the morning, about five in the summer, six in the winter, and I make a drawing. I’m one of the lucky ones, in that I haven’t really been affected apart from not being able to see and hug people.” For the past few years, right-handed Hambling has started each day with an ink drawing done with her left hand “to renew the sense of touch on the paper.” “I never quite know what’s going to happen. It’s like a pianist doing the scales.”

Lett Haines told Hambling to make her work her best friend. “You go to it whatever — you’re feeling tired, you’re feeling happy, you’re feeling randy, you’re feeling sad. Whatever you’re feeling, have a conversation with your work. Sometimes I have arguments with it! And that’s how I’ve lived my life,” she says. Haines and his other half Cedric Morris ran the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing from Benton End, a 16th-century house in Hadleigh, Suffolk, not far from where Hambling grew up. The story goes that Hambling walked to the school with two oil paintings when she was 15, showed her work to Morris and Haines, and started studying there the next day. After two years at Benton End, Hambling went to the Ipswich School of Art in 1962, and then to London, first Camberwell School of Art and then the Slade School.

Hambling bought the house in Clapham, in 1983, but Suffolk is her true home. Having grown up in the seaside county, Hambling returned to live there when Lady Gwatkin left her land with a cottage and gardens, in the village of Saxmundham, when she died in 1994. Hambling has been in a relationship with fellow artist Tory Lawrence for almost 40 years, and they spend a couple of days a week in London, because Hambling teaches at Morley College, and the rest of the time at Saxmundham, where the photographs for this story were taken. The cottage is near some of Suffolk’s famous water meadows, and a walk through the verdant gardens leads to Hambling’s studio. Gardening, “something that comes to you in middle age,” she laughs, is an interest for Hambling, who often sends visitors away with cuttings from her extensive plant collection.

“As you can see, I’m not a minimalist,” she says as we stand in the sitting room beneath a gigantic euphorbia plant called Esmeralda, before showing me a bathroom decorated with dozens of parrot figurines. If the Clapham house is anything to go by, her Saxmundham home is a lively place. Both studios are full of plants, and there are animals everywhere: a one-eyed black pug named Peggy follows Hambling around (and snores happily throughout our interview); and there are creatures immortalized not only in eclectic home decor but in her artworks too. She had finished a painting that morning, of a polar bear surrounded by dark blue waters and melting ice.

Climate change is a major concern for Hambling. The animal paintings allude to her alarm at how “we’re fucking up the planet.” She painted Rhino without horn, 2019, Baby elephant abandoned, 2019, and The last baboon, 2018, among others in recent years, each carrying a frenetic energy that makes it instantly recognizable as a Maggi Hambling. There’s movement in every quick, curved brushstroke, and the paintings are confrontational, as these animals wrestle with their own freedom. In one painting, Caged, 2019, a bird frantically attempts to fly from its metal home. A painting like that makes for poignant viewing: we feel for the captive bird and its relentless flying and remember how we have grappled with our own freedoms during the pandemic. Of course, Hambling did not envision this latter effect when she painted it. “Somebody pointed out to me that I’d done Caged a year before Covid. George Melly [the late English singer, and Hambling’s close friend and subject] always said artists sort of predicted the future somehow. I don’t know if that’s true, but you feel sort of in tune with what’s going on.”

Hambling has long been attuned to nature. Edge, an exhibition at Marlborough in 2017, featured paintings of glaciers and melting ice caps (The whole show was about uncertainty and how we are “living on the edge.” Prescient once again.). Her obsession with the sea started young, and she remembers going there with her mother. “Apparently, I would walk into the sea and talk to it intensely, as if it were my best friend. God knows what I said, but I now go to the sea and listen to it.” The North Sea has been the protagonist of many of Hambling’s works since 2002, most notably the Walls of Water, which were exhibited at London’s National Gallery in 2014. The gargantuan paintings show an explosion of water on the canvas, capturing both the fear and awe that a storm at sea might inspire. “The Walls of Water were in response to these enormous waves crashing on the sea wall at Southwold, near where I am in Suffolk. They were terrifying and beautiful at the same time — it was like nature getting back at man for what we’re doing to the planet.”

Looking back over Hambling’s life and art, many threads draw to the sea. “Well, you see, one thing leads to another in my work. The sea paintings became the Walls of Water, which led to paintings of melting ice caps, and they led to these animal paintings. It all follows on.” She compares her sea paintings to one of her most recognized and seminal sculptures, Henrietta Eating a Meringue, 2001. “It was only a year later, when I started to paint the sea, that I realized I was trying to get that same movement into the paintings, the sea being like a great mouth. Eating the shingle, eating, eating, eating. You only realize these things afterwards.” The white plaster sculpture is the voracious mouth of Henrietta Moraes, Queen of 1960s Soho, Hambling’s lover and muse in the year before Moraes’ death in 1999. “When Henrietta was told she had diabetes, she tucked into cream cakes in a big way. Part of her defiance.” As she had done previously with lost loved ones, Hambling made art about Moraes after she died — Moraes in the morgue, in her coffin, and from memory in the years following — in a process she calls “positive grieving.” “Because these people don’t die. If you’ve loved them, they don’t die, they go on being alive inside you, don’t they?”

The sea also provides a backdrop for one of Hambling’s “controversial” public artworks. Scallop, 2003, is a 13-foot-tall steel shell, fractured in places, which stands on the beach at Aldeburgh, in Suffolk, a tribute to the composer Benjamin Britten and, to Hambling, “one of the more beautiful things I’ve ever managed to do.” It’s barely possible to read about Hambling without learning of her various controversies. “It happened with Scallop, it happened with Oscar Wilde, and it happened more recently with Mary Wollstonecraft, as you possibly know,” she says with a wry smile and a roll of her bright blue eyes. “It” being a small public uproar; people have strong reactions to Hambling’s work. A Conversation with Oscar Wilde, 1998, is a London monument in which Wilde rises from his coffin, cigarette in hand. His coffin doubles as a bench because, as Hambling — a dedicated fan of Wilde since a childhood reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray — points out, he was “a great humanitarian, he cared about people passionately.” And more recently, A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft, 2020, was unveiled in Newington Green, North London, where the pioneering 18th-century feminist opened a school for girls in 1785. Hambling’s celebration of Wollstonecraft — crucially titled for her, not of her — was criticized for the nakedness of the woman who stands atop a roaring tower of organic matter. “She was a huge rebel. Died at 38, had a child out of wedlock, affairs with men and women — I think she was worn out frankly. I never set out to be controversial, but if something proves to be controversial, it does mean it’s got a bit of life to it.”

How a work might be received is never on Hambling’s mind when she’s creating it. For all their controversy, her pieces are also adored. “I remember I was painting [poet] Victor Musgrave, millions of years ago, and he said, ‘I know you’re an artist because you’ve got this combination of being vulnerable to what happens, what gets you by the short and curlies and makes you want to do a bit of work, and the backbone of steel to not give a bugger what anybody says about it.’” Irreverent and uncompromising as ever, Hambling simply gets to work. “I mean, you make the thing and it goes off into the world and then it has a life of its own. I’m already into the thrills and spills of the next bundle of trouble.”

Maggi Hambling’s REAL TIME is on view March 10th- April 30th at Marlborough gallery

Julian Broad shoots for German Vogue, Armani, D la Repubblica, IWC and Harrods, among others. @julian_broad_studio / Retouching by Simon Ings / Invisible Inc.

Belle Hutton contributes to AnOther Magazine and is on Instagram @bellehutton.