- Artist known for craggy self-portraits and public sculptures shows another side to her art – drawings of her father as he lay dying in 1996, and after his death
- ‘I miss him very much,’ she tells Guangdong Museum of Art crowd. She says artists are lucky they can paint the dead – ‘like grieving but in a positive way’
Last month Maggi Hambling and curator Philip Dodd found themselves practically shoved against the wall as they led enthusiastic visitors on a guided tour of her major retrospective at the Guangdong Museum of Art.
The straight-talking, chain-smoking, queer British artist didn't expect to be mobbed like a celebrity by the many young Chinese families who regularly visit the provincial government museum in Guangzhou on Sundays. She was told to expect a small group of journalists at the opening, but took the much larger crowd in her stride with help from a Mandarin-speaking translator.
The 73-year-old must have picked up a tip or two on comic delivery from her late friend George Melly, the jazz musician, writer and wit, to judge by her anecdotes from the tour.
"When I was about the size of this lovely young person here (pointing to a girl of about seven, sitting cross-legged on the floor), my mother said I would walk into the sea and talk to it. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk," she said the last bit rapidly, high-pitched and accompanied with hand gestures.
Young members of the audience squealed in laughter.
Now that she's older, she continued, she tried to listen to what the sea has to say instead. "What does the sea tell you?" Dodd asked. She harrumphed and replied: "I am not telling you!" More laughter.
Hambling had never been to China until she went to Beijing earlier this year for a smaller version of the retrospective, held at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.
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Dodd, who specialises in European and Chinese cultural exchanges, arranged for more than 60 artworks to be shown in the Guangzhou exhibition, called "For Beauty is Nothing But the Beginning of Terror" after the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
Among the works featured are Hambling's 1963 portrait of a stuffed rhinoceros that she painted at the age of 17, her earliest oil paintings of the sea, her dynamic, craggy self-portraits, recent large-scale "sea wall" paintings, and some small sculptures.
There is also a display of something she had never shown anywhere before: the complete set of drawings she made of her father in the last 10 days of his life and just after he died.
"I made this series of drawings sitting beside my father's bed as he lay very ill in Ipswich Hospital. There is a gap in the drawings. The last three I made when my father was dead and lying in the coffin. This is like a record of my father's death. He lived until a week of 1996 and I miss him very much," she told the crowd.
Parents and their children on the guided tour looked attentively, and what they saw was not just the image of death, but a profile remarkably similar to Hambling's own. In recording her father's death, it was as if she was imagining her own.
Confronting death in such a direct manner would seem an act of defiance, even though she insists that the subjects of her work always choose her rather than vice versa.
"The subject has to be in charge of me. I respond to what happens in life, like my father dying, or falling in love, or the sea taking me over when I was making the large sculpture of a scallop shell on the beach of Aldeburgh (a seaside town in eastern England)," she tells the Post.
Working on The Scallop (2003) " considered one of Britain's best-known pieces of public art " led her to paint many large, orgasmic and violent paintings of crashing waves that partly reflect her anger at how human beings seem intent on ruining the planet.
Less popular is her sculpture A Conversation with Oscar Wilde (1998) in central London, which shows Wilde sitting up in a coffin looking a bit like a tangle of seaweed, and smoking (Hambling likes to say, "Only civilised people smoke").
Hambling's Wilde is portrayed in the same style as the people in her oil paintings and as she paints herself. Her loose, wild brushstrokes form ugly caricatures, even when they are dynamic and affectionate impressions of people she loves " people like Henrietta Moraes, her muse and lover for a year. Moraes, a famous beauty who sat for painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, died in her arms at the age of 67.
She continued to paint Moraes for two or three years after she died, as she did her father and Melly, her dearest friend who died in 2007. "I think this is where artists are very lucky " it's like grieving but in a positive way. Because if they were close to you they go on being alive inside you," Hambling says.
She has a disdain for political correctness, which she blames for the growing conservatism in contemporary society and for the fact young people seem to be less free than her generation was.
As if to claim her right to speak without any filter, she stood on the doorsteps of the museum and proclaimed in front of a group of museum assistants: "Chinese people are a lot taller now, aren't they? I thought I'd be really tall in China." They responded with polite bemusement.
Though she wasn't given much time to see China outside of the exhibition venues, Hamblings says there is a powerful reason for her finally visiting the country.
"Chinese art came into my life in about 1960 something, by looking at it, experiencing it, responding to it at the British Museum in London. I had the most enormous respect for your art," she said at the opening of the Guangzhou exhibition.
Her early portrait of "Rosie the Rhino" was painted in ink because she wanted to take up the challenge of what is an exceedingly difficult medium, she said.
Such confrontation and experimentation was something she learned from seven years in art school (back when there were government grants, she pointed out), and is something she continues to do every day.
"I wake up every day at 5am full of optimism and the first thing I do is make a drawing " like a pianist practising scales," she says. "And I always experiment. Otherwise, the art is dead and stylised."
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