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Green Pebble Magazine
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Beccles NR34 8HE
Articles> Maggi Hambling
Image published
with permission of the artist
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’....
This is only a small part of the article.
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