As an artist who has always prided herself on looking forwards, Maggi Hambling has been offered a rare opportunity to cast a backward glance over her life and career, as part of a new exhibition at Gainsborough’s House in Sudbury.
Perhaps, there is a sense of mortality involved; Maggi suffered a heart attack in New York last year during the run-up to the opening of an exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery. Although, she denies this, and insists that everything is fine – 'I still play tennis' – the fact that it happened, and she is looking after her ailing partner, Tory Lawrence, must influence her outlook on the world.
Aptly named ‘Origins’, the exhibition explores six decades of Hambling’s work, focusing on her portraiture and love of the environment, and takes place in the very spot where she discovered the transformative power of art. Born in Sudbury, raised in Hadleigh, at the age of nine Maggi was taken on a visit to Gainsborough’s House where the artwork had an immediate effect on her.
'This is where I first registered real oil paintings, and I can remember the cows and the trees and quite suddenly this world opened up. I realised you can look at a canvas and be taken to somewhere else. That amazed me.' Inspired by what she had seen Maggi soon began creating her own art.
'At Hadleigh Hall School when Uncle Tom’s Cabin was read to us, which is largely about slaves being beaten, the fashion was largely to make patterns in arithmetic books, but I listened to the story and I tried to draw the slaves being beaten.
'I see now that drawing was the start of it all. It was the first thing that I ever did and it continued. At 14 I was top of the art exam at school and then, eventually, I left halfway through my A-levels and went to Ipswich Art School.'
The exhibition, comprising 30 works, tells Maggi’s story through people and preoccupations. Family and friends feature heavily, as Maggi has always demonstrated her love for those who have supported and entertained her, with sketches, informal drawings and fully realised paintings.
Her mother and father, Harry and Majorie Hambling, along with mentors Cedric Morris and Lett Haines, have been immortalised by her pen and brush as have friends like Stephen Fry, George Melly, Amanda Barrie and Sebastian Horsley, as well as partners like Tory Lawrence and Henrietta Moraes. She returns to these characters in her life a lot, even after death as she honours her debt to them.
The first person who really encouraged her to believe in herself was Yvonne Drewry, head of art at Amberfield School at Nacton. 'Coming top in the art exam at 14 was the start of it all and that was thanks to Yvonne Drewry. Without Yvonne Drewry I wouldn’t be where I am today.' But that was the just the start of the a long journey, fuelled not only by Maggi’s ambition and love of art but by a succession of supporting players who offered her some sage advice on the way.
Maggi's next piece of good fortune was attending Ipswich Art School where she was exposed to its wide-ranging, hands-on, try-everything approach to art education. 'Ipswich Art School was very good. It was a pre-diploma course so we covered a lot of different disciplines. One day a week we would be with Colin Moss in the life room, one day a week with Frida Sage in pottery, one day with Bernard Reynolds in sculpture, one day with Laurence Self doing something called basic design, and finally a day with Gerald Woods doing etching and printmaking.
'They did a great job of laying the foundations and the next task was getting into a London art school. Fortunately, I managed to get into Camberwell and then went onto Slade, but you cannot underestimate the value of my mentor Lett Haines at Benton End.' Benton End, the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, was run by Lett Haines and Cedric Morris who had encouraged the young Lucian Freud just before the outbreak of the Second World War.
'I started to go there at 15, working with Lett in the kitchen, and that’s when he gave me that amazing piece of advice that I have always treasured. He said to me: "If you are going to be an artist, you have to make your work your best friend. You can go to it whenever you’re happy, or sad, tired or randy, whenever… then you can have a conversation with it. And that is how I have lived my life.'
Yvonne Drewry also offered advice when Maggi found herself being mocked by some of her contemporaries at school for trying to paint the night sky. 'She said: "What anyone says about your work has to be like water off a duck’s back", which has been a great comfort to me over the years. 'I was very lucky that these things were said to me at the ages of 14 and 15.
'Yvonne also told me that the subject chooses you – you don’t choose the subject. I still think about these things. When there was all this fuss about the Mary Wollstonecraft sculpture I just took the telephone off the hook and let them get on with it.' Maggi fixes me with a look and says, matter-of-factly, that she doesn’t set out to be deliberately controversial. 'It just sort of happens.
'I did get quite upset the first time over Scallop when a group of people set themselves up as the 'Voice of Aldeburgh', simply because I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever managed to make. I remember my brother telling me he had been sitting in a pub and he overheard two old boys talking about Scallop,and one said to the other: "They shoulda had that in the war; that’ll have kept them Germans out", which amused me. You’ve got to keep laughing – it’s very important.'
The first image that people will see in Origins will be her 1963 portrait of Rosie the Rhino which dominated the entrance of Ipswich Museum for so many years. 'Laurence Self told us to go next door to the museum and draw. Rosie had a very commanding presence and it goes back to what Yvonne Drewry told me, the subject chooses you, you don’t choose the subject. Rosie had me by the short and curlies and I had to try and realise her on paper.
'I was captivated. It was the first time I had used ink and I absolutely regard that as my first portrait. The kind of conversation I had with Rosie, although he was dead and stuffed, was completely alive, and the drawing just happened as the best things do.'
The most recent painting in the show will be Skyline, a diptych of a flock of birds. 'I try, as I get older, to say more with less. I have a flock of birds coming out of the bottom left hand corner on one canvas and just some marks on the other. Make every mark count.' Although, Maggi’s love affair with the sea isn’t over, she no longer makes her dawn visits to the beach to welcome the waves.
'I don’t go and draw the sea anymore. I spent many years going down to the shore every morning and drawing; now it is inside me. The Walls of Water exhibition at the National Gallery came from that internalised landscape and when I had my show in New York last year The Met bought one of those pictures. Then I moved on to The Edge paintings, the climate change paintings, then it moved onto the animals that are threatened – one thing leads to another.'
Maggi pauses mid-thought and subtly changes tack as she links the progression of her career to the likely career progression of the students she currently teaches. 'Art students now are forced to become a brand. If they painted milk bottles as part of their degree show and were picked up by a gallery like White Cube, and those milk bottles sold, they would be forced into painting milk bottles for the rest of their life.
'My work is dictated by life and life moves on. I remember George Melly saying I will go down in art history as Maggi ‘Coffin’ Hambling, as I tend to paint people I know and love in their coffins, simply because that is the last time you will see them. That’s quite obvious. I am amazed that people are surprised that I still do it – or do it at all. If you love someone they go on being alive inside you. That’s why a couple of years ago I could make those paintings of mother and father and Lett because they live on inside me.'
Speaking of death and coffins, I broach the subject of Maggi’s heart attack in New York. She regards me silently for a minute or two before choosing her words carefully. 'I remember waking up during some sort of operation. I remember them pumping my chest, with their hands not with machines, and I remember thinking either you are going to live or you are going to die, and I then went back into another world. But I'm all right now.'
There is another silence before she adds. 'I suppose it was quite scary, but the biggest sensation was of just feeling peculiar. I now take five pills every morning and I’m fine.'She laughs when I suggest that a recent painting she finished of herself and a coffin is to allow her to have a complete set of ‘Death Portraits’ because she wouldn’t be in a position to do her own.
'It’s true, I have recently done a painting of myself in a coffin that may also be a child’s crib, and that was inspired by a wall painting in a church which had a skeleton standing up and looking at you. I can’t now remember which church it was. The picture has a ghost of me floating above this coffin. It’s true what they say, we are born alone and we die alone, no matter what we try to do to change things.'
Warming to the subject of death she adds: 'I do know what I want on my coffin, which I am not telling you, but I do want to be buried in the old part of Snape churchyard. Simon Loftus, who helped me so much with Scallop, counted 42 Hamblings buried there and I want to join them, the old ones. I’ll be the new old one.'
I suspect her ancestors will have to wait a while yet because the Maggi Hambling bustling around her studio in 2023 still has plenty of energy and clearly much to do.
Origins, the Maggi Hambling returns home exhibition, is on display at Gainsborough’s House until October 29, 2023.
