‘I do destroy quite a lot of my work’

In Maggi Hambling’s contralto boom, “Hello!” can sound like a cuff around the ear. There are two front doors to her London studio and I have approached the wrong one. A disembodied voice shouts a greeting from somewhere in the creeper and she emerges in a tangle of grey curls, bits of foliage stuck to her hair.

She has been up since dawn, like the bird of prey she so closely resembles. There is paint on her black gilet, on her tattered black Levis and on her trainers. Paint dribbles down the wall under the large canvas she is currently working on and the worn floorboards beneath it tell their tale of agony and ecstasy.

“No, no! Don’t talk about that. It’s bad luck. I meant to turn it to the wall but you were early.” She says she might have to destroy the painting if it is discussed or seen before she is ready to let it out into the world. Her usual method, if a painting has irreversibly died on her, is to attack it with a Stanley knife. “I do destroy quite a lot of work.”

There is no shortage of other pieces to talk about. Hambling is one of Britain’s leading contemporary artists, a woman of forthright views and fierce passions, best known for her portraits (among them Max Wall, Dorothy Hodgkin, George Melly, John Berger and Sarah Lucas), paintings of the sea and controversial public sculpture. Her sarcophagal monument to Oscar Wilde outside StMartin-in-the-Fields church, London, was pronounced “trivial tat” when it appeared in 1998 but is an affectionate landmark now.

I’m being given a preview of her “works on paper” that are soon to be shown at the British Museum. These drawings are rarely seen, dating from her student days to the

Maggi Hambling calls her studio ‘a torture chamber’ and finds portraitmaking as intense as an affair. Ahead of an exhibition of her prints and drawings, Elizabeth Grice meets her