Rachel Spence In Conversation with Maggi Hambling
By Holly Howe
Artist Maggi Hambling is a painter and sculptor, whose work covers portraits, landscapes, the climate crisis, and war. Her work has been exhibited around the globe, including the National Gallery in London, Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, and The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, to name but a few. In 2019 she also had two important retrospectives at both CAFA Art Museum in Beijing and Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou, China. Financial Times journalist Rachel Spence chatted with Maggi in her studio, discussing key themes in her works, and taking questions from AWITA members.
The importance of her paintings about war
The conversation opened with a chat about Maggi’s painting “Aleppo”, 2016, which was hung behind the two women. Maggi explained that we can easily become numb to the images we see on television of the atrocities of wars, but this is what compels her to make the works.
“I think a painting, or a sculpture or a poem, or whatever it is, can only move someone else by how much the artist in the first place has been moved by the subject. I was told very early on by my art teacher at school, that a subject chooses the artist – not the other way round.”
Practice
Maggi looks at her work and technique in a pragmatic way. While others may see texture in her paintings, Maggi dismisses this as simply “layers of failure”. She also likes to keep things fresh by adopting new approaches, such as sketching in the morning using her left hand. “I don't know what's going to happen, and I use my left hand because after so many years of painting my right hand is full of so many tricks – and one is always trying to get rid of tricks! So something possibly purer can come through me when I do it with my left hand, because I really don't know what I'm doing.” She also believes in the importance of leaving white space in her work, so the paper or the canvas can be “as eloquent where you don't put a mark as where you do put a mark – I hold that next to my heart.”
Self-portrait
They then discussed a recent self-portrait – a relatively minimal work featuring a lot of white space, which also includes Maggi’s late dog. She felt that growing older gave her the confidence to produce this, and that it forms a stark contrast with her more figurative self-portrait that she made in the 1970s, which is part of the National Portrait Gallery’s collection. She sees that earlier work as having “everything under the sun in it… with this cacophony of things happening”, whereas this more recent work is “a self-portrait of now”. She explained “I try to empty myself – and from nowhere that central figure, that ghost of me came. […] I'm now trying to say more with less.”
Mary Wollstonecraft
She also addressed the controversary around her recent sculpture in honour of Mary Wollstonecraft. Many critics were dismayed that she chose to create a nude female on top of an “abstract” base. Maggi clarified that the base is not abstract at all but is a “writhing tower from which the figure at the top rises, or is born from, the tower's intermingled female forms going through struggle to culminate in the woman at the top – standing there, free, and confronting the world.” As to why the figure was nude, she felt this prevented the clothes dating the woman. “To make a statue of anyone in the costume of history – then it seems to me that mostly it's going to belong to history. It was very important that my sculpture talked to people now.”
Criticism
However Maggi has always been resilient when it comes to criticism. She believes this comes from her experience at school when she was studying art. Having stayed up all night attempting to paint the night sky, she brought them into school where her classmates laughed at her attempts, which naturally upset her. However her teacher gave her advice which she still follows, telling her: “Don't be ridiculous, it has to be water off a duck's back! You are your best critic. It's only your criticism that matters, and what everyone else says has nothing to do with it!”