Scrawled on the door of Maggi Hambling’s Suffolk studio are the words ‘Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood.’ ‘Shakespeare’s Henry V,’ she says. ‘That’s the right spirit to come in here with.’ Alongside it are photographs of Marilyn Monroe, Samuel Beckett and Andy Murray: ‘My heroes.’ Her portrait of the tennis player, whom she admires for his ‘dogged persistence’, is one of several by her that are owned by the National Portrait Gallery. A further 19 of her works are in the Tate collection. And then there are the public sculptures. Her Scallop on Aldeburgh beach earns her fan mail, though it was once no less contentious than 2020’s A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft (there has been significant bristling, in some quarters, over the depicted woman’s nudity).
Maggi was born and grew up in ‘domestic’ west Suffolk and, before attending The Slade, she studied under Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines at the influential East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing. It was Lett-Haines who told her to make her work her best friend: ‘To go to it whatever I was feeling, whether bored or tired or happy or randy, and have a conversation with it. And that’s how I’ve lived my life really.’
She set up her studio here in her garden, five miles inland on ‘the wild side of Suffolk’, in 2006. She rises early – at 5am in the summer, 6am in the winter. She starts by drawing in ink with her left hand: ‘Painting isn’t just about colour – it’s about touch.’ Ideally, she will paint through until the evening, in the silent company of two vast euphorbias; the smaller is an offshoot of the larger, which is the daughter of Esmeralda, the euphorbia she has in her drawing room in London. Notably, there is no computer. ‘When everybody started to have them, I thought they would just tap in The National Gallery and up would come a tiny reproduction and they’d think they’d seen a Rembrandt,’ she explains. ‘So I’ve refused to have anything to do with them.’
When we visit, works for three exhibitions are stacked against the walls, though most face inwards, and they are not a topic for conversation. ‘There are good moments, when the muse is with me. But I live in a constant state of doubt about the whole thing,’ says Maggi. She also keeps a studio in London, but it is secondary. ‘You get a whole sense of a day in Suffolk: the early morning, the late morning and so on. And art started for me in Suffolk,’ she continues. ‘I think where something begins is important.’
Maggi Hambling’s solo exhibitions this year include ‘Origins’ at Gainsborough’s House, in Suffolk, June 17-October 29, and, later, at the Museo Ettore Fico, in Turin, Italy. firstsite.uk | gainsborough.org | museofico.it
