‘Paint goes on living’

Maggi Hambling is 70 later this year, and a career that took off when she was appointed the first artist in residence at the National Gallery, in 1980, shows no signs of slackening in momentum. Hambling is still as uncompromising as ever, and as difficult to categorise. An artist of sustained originality and inventiveness who fits no pigeonhole and is part of no group, she is a resolutely independent figure (she enjoys the description ‘maverick’) who considers it her duty to keep questioning assumptions (her own as much as other people’s) and looking afresh at the world. Occasionally she succumbs to an idée fixe — for a long while she painted sunrises as she now paints the sea — but the larger thing which is her art always emerges enriched by such lengthy immersion in a single subject. For instance, since she started painting waves, she has been trying to get the energy and crash of the sea into her other work, something she feels she achieved in the most recent paintings of her friend George Melly.

Hambling is unpredictably popular: as likely to appear on the BBC as in Pop, the ultra-stylish fashion magazine. (She features in the current edition with a 30-page interview, photographs by Jürgen Teller — though she declined to pose nude for him.) She hasn’t been promoted much abroad, though her un-English interest in death would make her an obvious candidate for exhibition in the Latin countries. Hambling’s latest work, once more engaging with the subject of death, is a protest against war. She gives it to us straight — the razed battlefields, the melting features of the victims — with no fashionable irony or theoretical mediation. She is refreshingly direct and painterly, her heart very much on her paint-splashed sleeve.

She exhibits regularly, the current show being War Requiem & Aftermath in the Inigo Rooms of Somerset House, part of King’s College London (until 31 May).