MAGGI HAMBLING

The celebrated painter and sculptor has confirmed her status as a world-class artist with this year’s retrospective at the British Museum. By Elizabeth Day

The history of contemporary art might have been very different were it not for Yvonne Drewry, a teacher at Amberfield School in Ipswich, Suffolk.

It was Ms Drewry who taught the young Maggi Hambling two fundamentally important things: one was how to be an artist, the other was to smoke. Both have become lifelong skills.

‘It was Yvonne Drewry who made me top of an art exam,’ says Hambling when we meet in her south-London studio. She takes a long drag on her Marlboro Menthol, the first of many. It was also Ms Drewry who told a 14-year-old Hambling that a lit cigarette was the best way of keeping insects off sticky canvases when painting in the open air.

‘From that moment on,’ she says, ‘If I had oil paint in one hand, there was a cigarette in the other.’

Maggi Hambling’s father was a bank manager, her mother a teacher. Until Ms Drewry’s arrival, being an artist had never crossed her mind. But after that art exam, her interest was sparked.

‘I remember staying up half the night trying to paint the night sky out of my bedroom window until about two o’clock in the morning. I took the paintings in the next day and all the girls were laughing at them. I was on the point of tears. Yvonne Drewry took to me to one side and said, “You have to be tough… You’re your own best critic, take no notice. It has to be water off a duck’s back.” So that was a wonderful thing to be told.’

Nearly six decades later, Hambling is one of our greatest living artists and takes all criticism with a pinch of salt (‘I don’t think it really matters. It’s only column inches’). Although she is fêted for her portraits (most notably of her long-term lover and muse, Henrietta Moraes), the coast provides much of her inspiration.

She is known for her expansive painted canvases of waves breaking and for her large public sculptural works, such as Scallop, erected on Aldeburgh beach in 2003 as a tribute to the composer Benjamin Britten. Scallop is a three-metrehigh stainless-steel structure that cost £75,000 to build. At first, many locals hated it, but over time, it has grown to be a much-loved part of the landscape.

This year, the British Museum opened a retrospective entitled ‘Touch: works on paper’, featuring 40 pieces spanning Hambling’s lifetime. It included an ink drawing of a stuffed rhinoceros in Ipswich Museum, created when the artist was 17, as well as moving studies of her parents on their deathbeds. The exhibition consolidated her reputation as one of our national treasures – at the opening, she mused that it was ‘humbling to be a Hambling’ in such a grand setting.

‘The touch on the paper is what makes the thing alive or not,’ she says of her work. ‘And also trying to touch the subject – the thing that you’re drawing – trying to touch it by making the drawing or making the painting.’ Is great art also about touching the viewer?

‘You know, you work and something goes out into the world and some people love it, some people hate it, some people are quite indifferent. You’re not in charge of that. If it’s no good, you get rid of it and just go on doing it.’

Yvonne Drewry couldn’t have put it better herself.