Maggi Hambling was born in Sudleigh and grew up in Hadleigh, Suffolk. She was drawn to the sea even as a child. Her ability in art was recognized in her teens and she was lucky to be mentored from the age of fifteen by the painters Sir Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett Haines at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing. She says that the most important thing she was taught by Lett, as she called him, was to make her work her best friend. So she learnt at fifteen that she could always go to it and have a conversation as with a friend who was always there. There followed seven years of formal art education, finishing at Camberwell and The Slade School of Art. At the Slade, Maggi experimented with conceptual art creating audio visual environments and performances in anarchic dramas. But, in 1970, she returned to oil paint: her first true friend. She began to teach at Morley College and her first show was there in 1973. She had trained herself to have a strong visual memory and these first paintings were keenly observed portraits of people in pubs which she would paint once she got home. She was then chosen to be part of “British Painting 74” at the Hayward Gallery and as she says, then “the fame bit began”. In 1994 she moved to what she calls the ‘Wild Side’ of Suffolk: fifteen minutes away from the sea. The work in this exhibition dates from 2002 onwards - as this is when Maggi became fascinated by the sea.
Her method of working was to drive to the sea early each morning to listen, to look, and to draw. She would return to the studio and paint from memory. The first wave painting happened in response to a storm at Thorpness. When she returned, the canvas she was working on at the time (the subject being a London beggar), appeared lifeless compared to the vivid memory of the storm that was still alive. So, directly on top of the beggar, Hambling painted Rough Sea, Jan, II, 2004. This picture sums up qualities about her work which she mentions in reference to Constable. His brushwork and paint are an earthy, direct, and honest response to the subject. This, surely, is what Hambling has achieved in her wave paintings. The paintings have increased in scale and Hambling regards them as “the finest things I’ve yet managed to make”. What she is aiming for is that the viewer feels a visceral response that is primarily how they would feel if there was a wave in front of them, not a painting. The paintings are wave portraits and show an artist deeply involved with her subject. She has said that each morning on the beach is like a conversation between life and death.
The Aldeburgh Scallop (A Conversation with the Sea) The main inspiration for The Scallop was a desire to create a tribute to Benjamin Britten. The shell was chosen as a symbol of the sea and as a traditional symbol of pilgrimage. It also represents the cradle of Venus and humorously, the moment Tony Curtis tries to seduce Marilyn Monroe by holding up a scallop shell as a logo for his family business in Some Like it Hot. Maggi Hambling wanted to take apart the shell and remake it in the same way that she felt Britten’s music took classical music apart and remade it “like nothing I had ever heard before”.
The Scallop belongs on the beach in Aldeburgh, standing where Britten walked, and looking over the sea where he swam. Maggi Hambling wanted to create a place of focus for conversations with the sea, and the horizon - a place to think about life and death. The building of the sculpture was a collaboration in which Maggi Hambling relied upon the expertise and cooperation of the steel fabricators Peggs of Aldeburgh.
The Maquette she took to them made from shell fragments shows how clear her idea was, and how important the craftsmen at the fabricators were in bringing her concept into reality. In his foreword to The Aldeburgh Scallop, Stephen Fry summed up the scallop sculpture by saying it, “is striking and remarkable in exactly the same way the Suffolk coast is striking and remarkable - in a strong, stark, frightening way that becomes more and more beautiful the more times you engage with it”. Maggi Hambling has said, “Art, if it is good, provides somewhere for the spirit to experience the sense of life and death simultaneously coexisting together.” In the quote above, she isn’t talking about her own work but, in many ways, it sums up what she has achieved.