Maggi Hambling, "Britain's Cantankerous Grandmother of Art," Is as Sexy as Her Paintings

"Victor Hugo used to get furious at trees, because they could live to be 300 years old. I'm a bit like that."

Maggi Hambling is sitting in the basement lobby of a hotel in Sanlitun, under a head of gray-white curls. You spot her at once.

For decades the 73-year-old artist has kept the same image: Einstein curls; a cigarette between her fingers — during the five years she tried to quit, she carried a plastic fake cigarette instead; eyes straight into the camera, no smile.

On March 8, her first retrospective in China opened at the CAFA Art Museum at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.

Hambling is considered "one of Britain's most important and most controversial artists." The retrospective gathers more than 60 works — oil paintings, prints, life drawings and sculptures — and tries to cover her whole career, from sketches made in the 1960s to her most recent portrait, Laughing 2.

The painting catches the moment a man throws his head back and laughs. Hambling likes painting people laughing, watching the features fall out of control and the face collapse — "it's a very sexy thing."

"Sexy" is a word she uses often about painting. Not only people: waves, paint and brushstrokes can all be sexy. She may sit down to draw, she says, but she always stands to paint, because painting is bodily, physical, "like dancing." Journalists who visit her studio in Suffolk like to photograph her against its walls, where the spot that once held her drawing board is now a blank hollow with paint radiating and running outward around it — the record of a pitched battle.

She has shown work since the 1960s, became the National Gallery's first artist-in-residence in 1980, was awarded an OBE in 1995, and has appeared on a television art-review program. Still working in her seventies, Hambling fits the definition of an "art celebrity."

She is known as "Britain's cantankerous grandmother of art." People love how bluntly she speaks, and are just as often enraged by her work, above all by her public sculptures.

One of her two best-known sculptures is "A Conversation with Oscar Wilde", facing Charing Cross Station in London. Its chief feature is that the whole thing is a bench: you can sit on it and "talk" with the Wilde at one end. People object to it for all sorts of reasons — some dislike the "macaroni" curls of his hair, others the cigarette between his fingers, which has been stolen again and again since the day it was unveiled.

In 2003 she raised a golden scallop sculpture on Aldeburgh beach in Suffolk, her home county, in tribute to the great 20th-century composer Benjamin Britten. It met fierce local resistance too: crowds of people wrote to the papers to complain, and some threatened to destroy it.

Hambling brushes the objections aside, and in recent years her work has answered the subjects of the age even more directly: global warming, the refugee crisis, the Battle of Aleppo. She hits back with a line from Wilde — "When the critics are divided, the artist is at one with himself." Critics often call her work too "frivolous"; it has also brought her a great deal of praise, as "vivid" and "full of tension."

From 2002 she turned to the sea, and in 2014 held a solo show on the theme at the National Gallery. These paintings, called "Walls of Water," take up a large part of the current retrospective and are the biggest works she has made.

On huge canvases, brushstrokes full of force rebuild the instant a wave smashes into the sea wall and bursts into color. "People see faces in them, animals — I think that's all fine." For her, the sea is also a metaphor for sex and death.

The purpose of art, she believes, is to bring people to the mysterious place where life and death meet. She sees it in every work of art she reveres.

Hambling is glad to paint death and old age, as if she wanted to face them down. Several times she has painted people already lying in their coffins, every one of them someone who had been closest to her: her mother, her father, a lover. This exhibition also includes many of the sketches she made of her father, most of them from when he was gravely ill.

"I made this painting of my father." She opens the catalogue in front of her. "It's one of my best works — he was very old by then. Someone bought it at a show, and then I missed it so much I had to buy it back — and it cost a lot more than before!"

The run of back-to-back interviews has left Hambling looking tired, but when something catches her she still lifts the catalogue to point things out, or throws a joke at the camera: "Where's my makeup team?"

These days she spends most of her time in a small village by the beach in Suffolk, away from crowds, keeping a hard daily working routine and her enthusiasm for tennis.

"All right! Artists really should shut up and stop talking so much nonsense." She stands up. She needs to go outside for a cigarette.

Below is QDaily's conversation with Maggi Hambling:

Q = QDaily

M = Maggi Hambling

Every wave is the portrait of that wave. It is always particular

Q: Many people come to you first through your oil paintings of the sea or your portraits, but drawing takes up a very important part of your work as well. Some critics say they can feel the trace of drawing in your oils, especially that distinct brushwork. Is that the relationship between the two?

M: When I was 13, while all the other girls were coloring in, I was drawing on paper. It was the only thing I could do. Once the art teacher at school came over and said, very gently, "I was wondering whether you might be colorblind." For me drawing is where everything starts. It always comes before painting, or sculpture. It is the core, the foundation of all my work.

(Pointing at a work) Look at this sea — yes, this ink drawing. Ink is a single thing, while an oil painting is one color crashing into another. So they're different, more complicated. A drawing is like a person's handwriting, the most intimate thing there is. Painting comes after that.

Q: I hear that every morning you draw first, to get your energy going?

M: Yes, I do drawing exercises every morning. It's the first thing I do, to refresh my sense of touch on paper. A few years ago I had a solo show at the British Museum called "Touch," and the whole show was my drawings. Touch — that matters enormously. Say I'm working as an artist now and you're the model in front of me. What I'm really doing is touching your face with the brush, then touching the paper, back and forth.

Q: Does that build a more private, closer relationship between you and your model?

M: In a way. You see, no two people in the world are the same, just as no wave looks like any other wave. Years ago I had a show called Portraits of People and the Sea. A portrait is usually taken to mean a person's face, but for me every wave is the portrait of that wave. It is always particular.

My principle is that whether it's a person or a huge wave rolling in, they are in charge of me, not me in charge of the thing I'm painting. That matters a lot. Many artists have an enormous sense of their own presence; I'm not like that. If I'm painting you, then the truth about you passes through me, as through a pipe, and pours into the drawing or the painting. I'm only a channel, helping you arrive.

Q: And yet you do have a clear personal style and mark, one that comes back in every one of your works.

M: I never think about style. That's for other people to talk about. What I care about is the flesh of the paint. You have to understand, paint is a very sexy thing. It's alive, so I'm alive, and the painting is alive too. I always stand to paint — I might sit down to draw, but I always stand to paint. It's full of movement, like dancing. It's exactly this physicality, this fleshiness, that makes painting so different from flat photography. That life is an important part of my work.

The moment I started painting in oils, I had a cigarette in my hand

Q: Some writers say writing a novel is like a long-distance run: you set your pace and keep good discipline. Is that like being a painter for life?

M: I think a lot of people imagine, oh, it's wonderful being an artist — when you feel like painting a picture, you get up and go to the studio. It isn't like that. I get up at five every morning, draw first, then work five or six hours. Every day, day after day. I have to work like that to make this (pointing at one of her paintings) happen. Right? Much of the time I'm in the studio full of doubt about myself, errr... (drawing it out), and then six o'clock comes and it's time for a whisky!

Q: In the morning?

M: No! Not at this age. You know how people always say things like "the most important thing is your health," and I think, boooooring (drawn out). How boring health is — though these days I do feel it's true, that it's what lets me go on painting. A British newspaper once asked me, "Are you healthy?" and I said, "Of course not!" Exercise is boring, whisky is fun. But I do play tennis. I'm very keen on tennis.

Q: Do you still play tennis these days?

M: Don't say "still"! It makes me sound too old. (laughs) Yes, I play tennis. I don't run fast, but I can hit the ball.

Q: Who do you play with?

M: Four women about my age. We play doubles, we all... you know, none of us can run fast, but we love it.

Q: I hear you once spent five years trying to give up smoking. Did you need something to take your mind off it?

M: Oh God, at the time I thought I'd never paint again! I lay in bed for three weeks, watched television all day, gnawed oat bars, got very fat. It was terrible. Then bit by bit, first half an hour, then an hour, I worked my way back into the routine of the studio.

From the moment I started painting in oils I had a cigarette in my hand. It was summer, and insects kept flying into the paint and sticking there — the paint, the brushes, the rags, all of it insects. My first art teacher at school came over from the other side of the field, and I asked her, "What do I do about these insects?" She said, "There's only one solution: have a cigarette." That's why cigarettes have been so hard for me to give up.

Q: You were about 15 then?

M: Fourteen. I gave up maths and geography at 11 — boring, boring, boring. When I started painting at 14, I found it was meaningful, right and true. It's the opposite of a hobby. It's my life. Some people like my work, some hate it, and a lot of people are completely indifferent to it.

The sculpture on the beach was already in my head when I was about 7. I was living at my grandfather's house near the sea, and it was the Queen's coronation, with fireworks everywhere. Huge fireworks bursting over the sea. It was tremendously exciting. I think that's why I always wanted to break, to split open, that scallop shell.

The purpose of art is to take people into the strange place where life and death meet

Q: Many of your works, this scallop shell among them, have drawn protests once they were finished. Opinion on what you make always seems to split. Can you usually predict how people will react?

M: No! I do my work, and once it goes out into the world it has a life of its own. When I finished the big sculpture on Aldeburgh beach, that great scallop shell, I thought it was marvelous — I think it's one of the most beautiful things I've ever made. I was genuinely surprised when people didn't want it, didn't like it, wanted it taken away.

Q: Do you now understand why the public reacted so fiercely against it?

M: People don't like change. They were used to there being nothing on that beach, and then suddenly this thing was there. A sculpture isn't like a painting. It takes up real space, it faces you down in your own real world, so some people find it unsettling and upsetting.

Q: Do you think people today are too easily offended by art?

M: Ha ha ha, there's this terrible political correctness now, it's everywhere. You have to be polite, you mustn't say the wrong thing. My job as an artist — say someone close to me dies, I feel wretched; or war, the wrecking of the planet, makes me angry. A painting can come out of any of these different things. The one thing that never changes is that there must be love in it: the eye, the hand and the heart, and the heart matters most.

A lot of my work is full of controversy. That was never my intention. But if it causes controversy, at least it means it's alive. That's no bad thing, you know — there are a lot of dead paintings in the world.

Q: What do you make of contemporary art?

M: Whenever I'm asked who my favorite living painter is, I always say Cy Twombly. I've said it for years, even after he had actually died. (laughs)

His work has the power to take you into a mysterious place. I believe the purpose of art is to take people into that strange, unaccountable place where life and death exist together and cross. The work of Henri Rousseau, of Van Gogh, and of Rembrandt, my favorite painter of all time, all has that power. Great art can let people enter a strange and mysterious world. That's what I want to do in my own work: when you pick up a brush you're face to face with the giants of history.

Q: If you could have only one subject for the rest of your working life, what would it be?

M: That can't be answered. Life decides what I paint. In 2016, for instance, I painted a boat at sea full of migrants, half sunk, crammed with people, lost on the ocean. When people I love die, I go on painting their portraits — I've made many of those, because I often feel they're still beside me. In 2002 I started painting the sea seriously.

It all depends on what happens in life. You know how some galleries are: say you paint a picture like that, and they want you to keep painting ones like it, because they sell for a lot of money. But I've never been any good at being told what to do. My mother said I was the most awkward child she'd ever met. I would never paint 20 pictures like that just to sell them. An artist should be a seeker after truth, not a businessman.

Q: When you say art needs truth, what do you mean?

M: People often commission me to paint their portraits because they like my work. I won't flatter them in the picture, and I won't make them look better than they are.

Once I was commissioned to paint the head of an important college in Cambridge. I went to meet him and we had lunch. Afterwards he said, very delicately, "I don't know if you've noticed, but my two eyes point in different directions." I thought that was rather funny — of course you notice, it's the first thing you notice about the man. Then he went on, "So how will you handle it?" I said I'd paint it exactly as it is, and he said, "Yes, yes, quite right." You see what I mean. I don't flatter people. I try to paint the truth of a person, a person's inside. I never think about whether it looks like them. That's also why I turned down the request to paint Margaret Thatcher's portrait.

Q: What do you think of Margaret Thatcher?

M: She's dead now, of course. (laughs) She tried to close every fine art department and keep only the commercial art, design and artwork that could make money. There you have Thatcher exactly: no respect for civilization, no feeling for art.

Q: From your early work to your most recent one can see a gradual change in your style. Do you think your painting has grown more accomplished over the years, or does the change simply mark different stages of life?

M: I think my work now has more energy than ever. If I'm painting someone, I want them to look as though they're breathing — unless they're already lying in a coffin.

Q: Do you think you feel things more than most people do? You seem to have a love-hate relationship with those around you.

M: People call me "Britain's cantankerous grandmother of art." (laughs) You know, people can eat you alive, so I've put up plenty of barriers to make it hard for them to come close. I like to choose who gets to eat me, who gets to drink my blood. But inside I'm really very soft. All that is only paint on the wall.

When my parents died it hit me harder than it hit my brothers and sisters, because they were all married with children and I had neither. You asked whether my work is a response to what happens in life. Years ago a major figure in the British art world who ran a gallery said to me, "I know you're an artist, because you're fragile, deeply affected by what happens around you, moved by things — and you also have a spine of steel and don't care what people think of your work." That matters a great deal. Oscar Wilde said something wonderful: "When the critics are divided, the artist is at one with himself."

Q: Is there a question you keep coming back to?

M: Death. We don't know what death is like. Victor Hugo used to get furious at trees, because they could live to be 300 years old. I'm a bit like that.

Cover image: Maggi Hambling. Banner image: Father Painting, 8th December 1997, Maggi Hambling, 1997. Courtesy of the Central Academy of Fine Arts