Much has been written about one of Suffolk’s favourite and often-controversial daughters: about her occasional fedoras and feather boas, thick black mascara and that hallmark cigarette; about her private life, lovers, crotchety moods and raspy laugh; and the furore over some of her artworks, most notably the vandalism to the cigarette of her Oscar Wilde bronze and to her Aldeburgh sculpture, Scallop.

 

Read these reports and it’s possible to lose sight of a more contemplative Maggi Hambling; one who at the age of 63 spends much of the year in a Suffolk cottage drawing and painting waves and even writing the odd spot of poetry. And it is this Maggi Hambling who will be exhibiting at Snape Maltings in June with a selection of coloured monoprints and her new  book, You Are The Sea.

 

Snape Maltings has a special place in Maggi’s heart: it is where she exhibited her first North Sea Paintings paintings seven years ago. Already well-established and of international renown for her portraiture and figurative works, she began painting waves on 30 November 2002. Why such a precise recollection? Because on that day a storm blew her onto a new course and waves have been a subject of fascination for her ever since.

 

‘It was after I had made the maquette for Scallop. I’d been that morning to the sea at Thorpeness and there was a fantastic storm raging about,’ she recollects. ‘I came back here to the studio and the storm was still raging through all the trees and the land around me. Here I was, painting this little 12 by 10-inch canvas, in oil, a little   portrait of a beggar from memory, and I looked out of my window in my studio and I thought to myself, “What the hell are you doing, painting a London beggar, when you’re experiencing this fantastically exciting storm? Crazy! And so I painted over the beggar and it became a sea storm from that morning.’

 

Numerous depictions of the sea followed over the subsequent years. Large, sexy, whorling oils; small, intense miniatures; mixed media; and black and white monotypes, all depicting the sea in its various, but usually climactic, moods. Her Snape Maltings exhibition will incorporate 20 coloured monotypes; the next step in her ongoing quest to somehow get under the skin of the sea.

 

On most days Maggi makes an early start - before most people have risen - by going to the sea on the Suffolk coast near Aldeburgh to draw with graphite in her sketchbook. ‘I draw the sea in any condition but it is the waves breaking, really, that I am obsessed by, given a calm sea or a rough sea or a windy sea. It’s the approach of a wave, it’s sexual. It gradually comes towards you, rises into a solid crest which then dissolves. Orgasmic.’

 

Add to that the fact that in Suffolk the sea is responsible for coastal erosion and suddenly Maggi’s waves are a metaphor for an entire life cycle. ‘Sex, life, death, and everything else’, she says. ‘The sea has everything going for it, it’s a big subject. And of course, the older I get, the more I identify with the land which is being eroded. The sea is like time, eroding, it’s inevitable. The erosion of land, the erosion of life.’

 

But despite Maggi’s much publicised interest in death – ‘I’ve done many portraits of corpses, I’m sure you’ve noticed’ – what appeals to her the most is capturing life. Even when painting the people she loves on their deathbeds or in their coffins – her father, her muse Henrietta Moraes, the late jazz singer and close friend George Melly – her brushstrokes create a vigour and vitality that speaks of an underlying life force.

 

‘When I do a portrait, it’s all about movement,’ explains the woman who one writer described as ‘the female [Francis] Bacon’. ‘It’s the movement that obsesses me. It’s  just the same thing, painting a portrait, painting a wave. I like my people to look like they’re breathing. It’s the movement, life, that’s what I want to try and make happen on the canvas or in monoprint or sculpture.’

 

Maggi’s own life has, from all accounts, been a hard-working one full of movement. Born in Sudbury, Suffolk, at the end of the Second World War, she grew up in Hadleigh, attended the East Anglian School of Painting & Drawing at the age of 15 where she was guided by its founders, the Welsh painter Sir Cedric Morris Bt and his life-long partner Arthur Lett-Haines. This was followed by a period at Ipswich Art School (now part of University Campus Suffolk’s New College), then Camberwell College of Arts, and finally Slade School of Fine Art. In 1980 she became the first Artist in Residence at the National Gallery and in the ensuing years no fewer than eight of her portraits have been added to the National Portrait Gallery’s collection.

 

In 1997 she was commissioned to create a statue to commemorate the Irish playwright and author Oscar Wilde; she created a sculpture of him rising out of his coffin with a jaunty cigarette  – soon to be repeatedly sawn off by vandals  – in one hand. This was followed in 2003 by her four-metre high tribute to the composer Benjamin Britten, Scallop. Situated on Aldeburgh beach, it divided the opinion of the inhabitants of the seaside resort – mainly, it seems, because planning permission was granted to position it on a strip of ‘heritage coast’ – and for a while the sculpture was repeatedly defaced with the spray-painted message ‘Tin can, move it’.

 

Recently, The Daily Telegraph named Aldeburgh the ninth best place to visit in Britain, describing the location as: ‘The site of Maggi Hambling's striking sculpture – a four-metre high steel sculpture of two interlocking scallop shells – commemorating Benjamin Britten’.

 

The irony of this endorsement does not escape Maggi. At the time of all the controversy, some newspapers ‘came absolutely down on the side of the detractors,’ she remembers, laughing. ‘And now The Daily Telegraph gives Scallop a picture bigger than anything else in the whole article! It all comes round.’

 

Rather than allow the detractors to affect her, Maggi is much more excited by the fact that people ‘have married at [Scallop], held funerals there, and made love under it’. She conceived it, she explains, as a place of  contemplation, ‘where someone wanting to have a deep conversation with the horizon, can talk to the sea. I love the fact that people are using it and a great many people are  loving it.’

 

Living not far from Scallop in a cottage bequeathed to her by Lady Gwatkin, an admirer, Maggi regularly sits by the sculpture to draw. If she is there, it is at dawn, often before it is light enough to see the sea. Despite taking time out to do a moving series of paintings of her friend George Melly after he died, the Suffolk coast continues to draw her. ‘I’m still obsessed with our bit of sea,’ she says. ‘I see no reason for that to stop, really. Part of my obsession is in experimenting with various media [to capture it]. Like doing these monotypes. It’s the unexpected nature of the monotypes that makes them exciting. It’s all in reverse, and the textures and the movement of paint are really very surprising.’

 

Her monotypes are created by painting with oil on glass and then transferring the image onto paper while the paint is still wet. Because the glass is not etched, there can only ever be one unique print from each painting. ‘You have to tear up the bad ones,’ she says decisively. ‘There’s too much bad art in the world, you know, I don’t want to be responsible for producing any more. So, if I have my doubts about anything, it’s destroyed. In the case of a canvas, it’s sliced up with a Stanley knife and in the case of a monoprint or watercolour, it’s easier, it’s torn up. It makes me absolutely furious to have to do it, of course it does, but you have to have a highly-developed sense of self-criticism. Sometimes people ask me how long a work of art has taken to create. It’s an unanswerable question because I don’t know. You’ve got to count all the times of producing the shit before you produce something that’s  better.’

 

A little later, she adds: ‘You have to love the thing you paint. A work of art should be a thing of love.’

 

Her book, You Are The Sea, is a departure for the artist. She describes how the seed of an idea was sown by a director of The Lowry in Manchester, where she is to exhibit in October. It is a book of poetry and images and she provides a tantalizing glimpse into how her creativity suddenly fired on all pistons when she explains, ‘The images and the words came together, they came all at once. I didn’t write the poem and then make illustrations for it, or do the images and then write a poem. That’s not happened before for me, it’s a new thing, it’s so exciting.’

 

The book, which was still at the printers at the time of the interview, will be ‘a little book,’ she says fondly. ‘It will be so little, it can go in your pocket, and it will be a love poem to the sea.’

 

Maggi Hambling’s work can be seen in the Tate, British Museum, National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, and many other public collections in the UK and abroad.