ART: Maggi Hambling

Sea sculpture Paintings and etchings
Marlborough Fine Art, London. Until 5 June, Fitzwilliam, Cambridge. Until 8 August.
Marlborough Fine Art

There’s an orgasm exploding above a short woman’s head; her cropped blonde wisps echo the curling spray arcing from a moonlit north sea wave. The crashing wave in ‘Night erosion’ is one of Hambling’s most recent works. The sea is the focus of her new work; it is also the new love in her life. Although its tricky to actually see the work through the forest of vintage designer wear, I squeeze past former culture minister Chris Smith and former Booker prize winner Sheena MacKay – both personal friends of Hambling’s - to peer a bit closer.

Just looking at the whoosh of wave as it breaks and recedes into the night evokes a sensual Sapphic memory. “The approach of the wave, the gradual building up, becoming solid at its crest, shattering and dissolving is orgasmic,’ Hambling tells me; ‘There is a lesbionic theme,’ she adds, ‘think of Virginia Woolf and Daphne du Maurier…the sea is referred to as she; you never think of it as he. It’s a very sexy woman and I have a love affair with it.’ (See Hambling’s eulogy to the sea, below)

Hambling, in case you didn’t already know is one of Britain’s greatest living artists - queer art royalty, if you like - and a prolific one at that. Not a day goes by without putting brush to canvas or making graphite marks in her notebook. ‘It is my life. I get pottier than ever if I don’t work. I’m a boring workaholic,’ she admits.

Hambling chose to make the sea her muse in November 2002 when she had completed the maquette for her sculpture ‘Scallop’ on Aldeburgh beach. ‘There was a pause between that and making the real thing and I had gone to the sea in the early morning and the waves were lashing and it was intensely exciting. I was painting from memory a portrait of a beggar and at 3pm in the afternoon I said to myself ‘what are you doing painting this beggar?’ when what was inside of me was the storm in the sea.’ She painted the first one on top of the beggar and produced a series that helped her raise the money to fund the enormous bronze scallop. ‘By that time, the sea had got me by the short and curlies,’ she admits.

And she hasn’t stopped since; turning her hand to etchings as well as some beautiful bronze sea sculptures. Some of my favourites are the waves in relief which mirror the many moods of the temperamental sea. In Wave Relief XXVI, a gorgeous turquoise sea rollocks under a summer sky, in Wave Relief XXI, a dark, menacing seascape suggests the mystery of the deep unknown. It sounds impossible but I can almost smell the sea spray, something with which Hambling herself concurs. ‘I listen to the sea and draw it every morning and try to make the sound of the sea which is impossible but there’s no point in doing art if it’s possible.’

YOU ARE THE SEA
Im am the shifting shingle
You approach with stealth
Then in the dark moons of your curves
I am tossed, lost, displaced
With greedy lovers’ tongues and lips
You suck me in and in again
We rise together, we rise together
Then float safe on liquid breasts
Until the dance begins again
And you thrust deep
And my resistance is low
Dissolve, dissolve
No defence against the your relentless advance
I am but a ghost of the shore
Disappeared in you.

Maggi Hambling, 2008

(Words: Jane Czyzselska
)

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