Painting through Doubt and Despair: In Conversation with Maggi Hambling

Maggi Hambling CBE is a painter and sculptor. Subjects for many of her paintings are the sea and the dead. Her sculptures are famous and controversial: they include A Conversation with Oscar Wilde and A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft. She has been awarded the Jerwood Painting Prize and the Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture.

CJLPA: There is a humanity in your work which is uncompromising, with no sentimentality, which seems to rise from the depth of things, whether your work depicts a laughing face, the storm at sea, or a dying man. You say you need to empty yourself of your baggage in order for the subject matter to come through you onto the canvas or into the sculpture. How difficult is it for you to achieve that state? How do you do it?

Maggi Hambling: I live in constant doubt. When something better happens in my work I cannot account for how or why, the source is always mysterious. The muse is fickle and it is always after desperation that I find courage.

CJLPA: Life, death, and love seem to be at the very core of your work, arrived at through a creative process where intuition plays a major role. One of your paintings, which has the word ‘certain’ written at the bottom, has started as an attempt to paint something like the morning dew, and then you turned it upside down, only to see the face of your father emerge from the sea of brushstrokes. Can you elaborate on this process and the issue of certainty/uncertainty?

MH: The whole business is uncertain, as every drawing, painting, or sculpture must be an experiment… If not, there is only mannerism, which is the death of art.

CJLPA: In your more recent work, you seem to be preoccupied with the fragility of humankind, wars, refugees dying at sea, the melting of the ice caps, and the mindless cruelty we inflict on animals. Are these things which make you angry? Can you comment on this?

MH: Yes, I feel anger and despair, but mostly at myself.

CJLPA: One of your sculptures—which started out as a found object, and then you made into the head of a pig, hollow on the inside—is meant to be the head of a politician. As an artist, is there a piece of advice you would give to future politicians?

MH: Listen, without an agenda, and remember that actions speak louder than words.

CJLPA: If you were to choose one thing to change in society or law, what would it be?

MH: Intolerance.

Fig 1. 2016 (Maggi Hambling 2016, oil on canvas, 84 x 72in).

Fig 2. Aleppo IV (Maggi Hambling 2016–17, oil on canvas, 67 x 54in).

Fig 3. Rhino without horn (Maggi Hambling 2019, oil on canvas, 48 x 36in).

Fig 4. Victim II (Maggi Hambling 2013, oil on canvas, 12 x 17in).

Alexander (Sami) Kardos-Nyheim, the interviewer, is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of CJLPA.