Alex Leith meets Maggi Hambling

I bump into Simon Martin, the director of Pallant House, at Brighton Railway Station. “That’s a coincidence,” I say. “I’m on my way to your workplace now, to interview Maggi Hambling.” It’s the day before Hambling’s new show, Nightingale Night, opens to the public at the Chichester gallery, and she’s granted ROSA an interview, which – given her reputation for not suffering fools gladly – I’m a bit nervous about. I know Simon knows her because I’ve already read an online version of the show’s catalogue, in which he describes her hair as ‘reminding him of the tempestuous sea’, and reports that she has a RSPB clock on her studio wall that chimes the hour with birdsong.

“I hope she’s in a good mood,” he smiles. Gulp.

Several hours later, I’m sitting next to the famous artist, on a padded bench, in a gallery room full of her latest series of paintings, large and small, all of which have inky-black backgrounds, over which are painted iridescent splashes and rivulets of gold. There are no other seats, so we have no choice but to sit side by side, facing the largest of these paintings, which is a bit awkward. She looks stern. Or maybe just tired.

“Have you travelled far?” I ask her. “Who are you, the Queen?” she replies. “The Queen?” “That’s what she always asked people she met, to break the ice. London. I’ve come from London.” She’s wearing a cream jacket, over a black blouse, with white stars, a pendant round her neck. Her hair is, indeed, tempestuous.

It’s been quietly suggested by the gallery’s PR department that Maggi doesn’t want me to ask about the usual stuff she’s always asked to talk about. The controversial sculptures of Oscar Wilde in central London, Mary Wollstonecraft in Newington Green, and the scallop on the beach in Aldeburgh, in her native Suffolk, dedicated to Benjamin Britten. Her artistic education at Benton End with Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-

Haines, then at The Slade, where she cut an eccentric figure and worked out she preferred girls to boys. Her obsession with death, and her portraits of dead relatives. Her insistence on smoking in public spaces – before she gave up the fags – and her love of Carling Special Brew. Her famous Desert Island Discs interview in 2005, in which she chose as her luxury the entire wine cellar from All Souls College, Oxford (Sue Lawley granted it to her).

So I ask her about the paintings around us, about her latest work, which is a good thing, because I’ve read a lot of interviews with her, and she is always asked the same questions, and if you want to hear the answers to them, they’re all out there, online. I’ve been researching her brilliant Nightingale Night series, and have spent half an hour before we meet deeply examining the paintings, and I want to know more about their origin story.

“I was a guest of a great friend of mine who had as his birthday treat a trip into the Sussex wilderness, where the nightingales sing,” she says, in that quiet, deliberate, old-BBC way she speaks, “led by Sam, the nightingale expert.”

This is Sam Lee, a folk singer and song collector who leads night-time expeditions into the woods in a secret Sussex location, where he and a violinist play folk music, and the local nightingales reply, adapting their pitch and tone to respond to the music, like an inter-species version of Duelling Banjos

“There were about twelve of us, and it was the 22nd of April last year, and it was very, very, very wet under foot and pouring down on our heads. And I had to walk with Sam, because I was the oldest member of the party, and I just concentrated on Alec Guinness in Bridge Over the River Kwai, putting one foot in front of the other through all the swamps, because it was like that. So we walked what seemed a very long while, probably 45 minutes, to this spot where the nightingales were…”

At this point I realise what the pendant is, as she whips it to her mouth, then blows out a puff of smoke, demonstrating deft surreptitiousness in her vaping technique.

“And… it was… extraordinary,” she continues. “I mean, I’d never heard nightingales before, and their song is otherworldly. It’s like something from another planet. God or something. And I think people have rather lost the sense of awe. I think of this little print by Hokusai with a couple of figures, very small scale, they’re looking up and contemplating Mount Fuji, and you see, I think nowadays a lot of people go to Mount Fuji and just do a selfie. They wouldn’t have time to actually take in the magic of that place. And so I was completely, completely absorbed in this extraordinary sound, this otherworldly sound.”

There’s another puff on the vape pendant, and I say “hey, does that mean I can vape too?”, pulling out my own pipe, and she winks, and gives me her first smile of the interview, and we both take a draw, and exhale our vaporous emissions.

“So I can say that’s why I’ve used gold paint, because, you know, in Renaissance pictures haloes were always painted in gold, and gold is obviously very precious, and always smacks of something from another world. And that was how the sound was for me, these nightingales, and it was, it was all very spiritual. And we sat on stools, and mine sank, and I hung on to the next person to me, and she sank in the mud, and it was a bit like dominoes going down. But at least everybody laughed, because the whole thing was very… well it felt as if we had touched the sublime. I know these are not very fashionable words, but it was extraordinary.”

I tell Maggi that I went to see her last series of paintings, Maelstrom, at the Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert Gallery in London last year, painted shortly after she had suffered a lifethreatening heart attack in New York, and how I found them very different in mood to the Nightingale Night collection. “They were pretty raw paintings,” she replies. “I thought [they were] in response to the Ukrainian war. But people said to me, no, no, you’ve just painted your heart attack, which I suppose is the same thing. Those paintings were full of angst and fury, and these new ones are quite the opposite… I hope I’ve touched upon this sort of fleeting beauty. The sound is there one minute and then it’s gone. It’s all very transitory. So I’m trying to make something that lasts.”

Again, there’s a quick puff punctuating a Hambling pause. “I mean, it’s quite impossible to paint the sound of nightingales, of course, but there wouldn’t be much point in painting a picture that it was possible to paint… so I hope they have something of that fleeting moment of magic.”

So was there a eureka moment, in the woods that April night in Sussex, when she realised she’d discovered the subject of her next body of work? “No. I just painted the first one, and that led to the next one. And that led to the next one. You know what? It wasn’t calculated at all. It just happened. And you see when I’m really painting, the painting paints itself, and they’re the moments that I live for… when I set off to this outing to listen to nightingales, I never imagined it was going to inspire a whole year’s work.”

“Because sometimes I can work on something for several months, and a painting can come alive and die and come alive and die a lot of times. If it finally kicks the bucket, you’ve got to get rid of it. Like when Amy Winehouse died, I tried to paint a large portrait of her for about three months, and then I got rid of it, and then Wall of Water happened [Hambling’s non-representational Winehouse portrait, exhibited at the National Gallery], which, according to Amy’s mother, contained all her movements and her sound. And that painting painted itself in a very short time, and it wouldn’t have painted itself unless I’d been through the hell of the previous three months or so. I mean, you know, I live in a constant state of doom and gloom [until] something actually starts to paint itself. Those are the moments that I live for. That’s a feeling unlike anything else.”

The Nightingale Night series is the culmination – or at least the latest manifestation – of a longer series of works Hambling has been working on, responding to sound and music, which you might call her ‘synaesthetic period’. Four of these works are included in the Pallant House show: a portrait of Leonard Cohen (“I was just making marks to do with his music”); another of PJ Harvey (“I went to a concert by her at the Roundhouse and was amazed by this incredible sound that filled the whole place, emanating from this tiny creature”); a third responding to Nick Cave’s The Night of the Lotus Eaters, and a diptych portrait of Will Young.

“Will Young?” I ask. “How come Will Young?” “We were neighbours in Clapham [Hambling divides her time between Suffolk and London] and we bumped into one another and became good friends. I think he sings from the heart, and everything he does is from the heart. And so that’s why it’s a diptych, and his portrait is on the left, and the gold [paint, on the right-hand panel] is coming out of his heart.”

Various PRs have been popping their heads around the door to signal that my time with Maggi has come to an end, but she seems very content to carry on, and I take the opportunity to snap a portrait. I ask her to stand in front of the large painting we’ve been sat in front of, so she is entirely framed by it. She is reluctant – she doesn’t want her work to be obscured, even by her own image. I push, and she begrudgingly obliges. “Say nightingale”, I say, attempting to elicit another smile. “Say prune,” she responds, pursing her lips to produce a mock scowl. Have you ever seen a photograph of Maggi Hambling grinning?

She encourages me to ignore the PRs, and keep going. I bring up the nightingale’s remarkable song repertoire, which includes 1,200 unique sounds, and 250 phrases, which, ornithologists have surmised, is nothing other than a mating call. Is Maggi Hambling’s art – is art in general – in effect the same thing? An attempt by the artist to increase their sexual attraction, by means of their artistic prowess? A wider grin. “The physicality of paint is very important to me. I don’t know if you saw the documentary Maggi Hambling, Making Love with the Paint [made in 2020, to celebrate her 75th birthday], because oil paint itself is very sexy stuff, and you’ve got to work with this sexy stuff to make a work of art.”

Then I bring up the laughter that punctured the sublimity of the nightingale moment in the Sussex woods that night. Is it important to ground such transcendental moments with baser instincts, to get back down to earth? “No,” she says, rather emphatically. “That was pure sublimity. The laughter was… just a thing that happened. But I mean, laughter is very important to me. I can’t, I can’t imagine life without laughter. There are people who don’t laugh. Well, I tend to avoid them. You know, laughter is the breath of life.”

A few minutes after we part, I bump into Maggi again in a corridor, surrounded by a group of PRs, discussing, no doubt, her next pre-show-opening duty. “Has this man been given a catalogue?” she asks, and I rather sheepishly respond that I haven’t, I’ve just got a pdf version. The matter is resolved in no time, and when I ask her to sign it, she does so, in a flourish, with a Sharpie, slipping me a conspiratorial wink. As I leave the building, I realise that Maggi Hambling is by now – I’m sure of it – in a very good mood.