Great art, Maggi Hambling tells hube, is what emerges when an artist grapples with the truth of their existence. It is a response to what it means to live, she says, and crucially, what it means to die. Hambling, who turned 80 last year, remains one of England’s most prolific—if not controversial—artists. The maverick Hambling, who for many years refused to be photographed without a scowl or cigarette, is perhaps best publicly known for her sculpture: a smiling Oscar Wilde emerging from a granite sarcophagus, hair askew, cigarette in hand; a fractured scallop shell, monumental in size, for the composer Benjamin Britten; a nude and bountifully bushed figure rising from a swirling silver mass to commemorate the founding feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. These works, along with her portraits and turbulent seascapes, have inspired admiration and argument—none of which bothers Hambling, fond as she is of Wilde’s famous line: “When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.”
hube: Artistic and social freedom often find themselves in conflict, and for many artists this conflict becomes a source of inspiration. How do you think about freedom in your own life and work? What does it mean to you today?
Maggi Hambling: As a child, Oscar Wilde’s children’s stories were read to us at school and heard as a clarion call. Then my life began at Benton End—the first art school I attended, run by the artists Cedric Morris and [Arthur]Lett-Haines. Cedric and Lett rejected convention, were openly queer when it was illegal to be, and allowed their students to explore their own artistic and social freedoms. I loved them both, but Lett was my mentor. It was Lett who said the two most important things: firstly, there was no point being an artist without imagination, and, secondly, to make my work my best friend, so I can go to it however I am feeling. This is how I live and work. I feel the most free, the most alive, alone in the studio with my work. Sometimes it’s torture, sometimes it’s better than anything else.
Self-Portrait, 2017
