Maggi Hambling's Habit of Subverting Expectations | Brilliant Ideas Ep. 43

brilliant ideas powered by Hyundai Motor [Music] I think this self-portrait began on a bad day did her hangnail are something the darkness and the doom and gloom and British artist Maggi Hambling is best known for her intimate portraits paintings of the sea and controversial public sculptures but being something of a nonconformist she refuses to be pigeonholed I mean I'm not a painter who started out by painting milk bottles and goes on painting milk bottles for the rest of time if you become complacent in the way that you look at her pictures or her sculpture or her installations she will revert and subvert your expectations of what you think that is she does almost perversely Amy Winehouse still singing so singing her work really you know grabs you by the throat and doesn't let you go there are people who hate my worth in there other people are completely indifferent to it none of that's up to me when it's left my hands and then it has to take care of itself and if it becomes a controversial sing which has happened to me I mean I think it just shows it's got a bit of life to it she's constantly restlessly looking for new material new sensations new images portrait East expression East I don't like those eastwards I'm not an East after half a century of challenging the art world Maggi Hambling has a new exhibition at the British Museum well of course it's nerve-wracking having a shared the British Museum I'm not sure where one could possibly have a share after the vision I conceived of heavy entitled touch the exhibition features 40 works many of which have never been seen in public before primarily on paper and ranging from early pieces right through to some of her most recent works the show reveals how drawing is at the heart of her artistic practice drawing is her absolute starting point she said that she makes a drawing every morning it's the touch it's the physical action of making and through making understanding and thinking and absorbing and it's all the time getting rid of your own rubbish that something else can take over and that does occasionally happen so that's here with all these drinks something else did them do you know what I mean I only feel responsible for the bad ones these are the better ones we have in this show touch of course is something instinctive it happens before understanding it's as unmediated as anything can be and I think that therefore beautifully describes this idea of an encounter is extremely important in her work you see the very early works like the wonderful Rosie the rhinoceros from Ipswich Museum and it's all there the intensity of the gaze the bristling with life is a stuffed rhinoceros but you wouldn't know it it's charging towards you looking rather like Maggie with the BDI as well as you already have got that intensity that intensity of engagement so we're beginning at the beginning Maggi Hambling was born in 1945 and raised in rural Suffolk where she still lives and works her first step towards becoming an artist happened quite by accident when I was 14 there was an art examined school and I did nothing but flick paints of people and generally draw attention to myself because I was deeply in love with the biology mistress individual age and exam and then I saw the clock and it's 20 past 3:00 so better to sign so I did a painting in 10 minutes and when results came out three weeks later I was top of art thought this is worth looking into at the age of 15 hambling met artist let's Haines who was one of her teachers at the East Anglian school of painting and drawing let would become Maggie's mentor I worked with let and he said the most important thing everyone said you must make a work your best friend that you can go to it whatever you're feeling you're feeling tired you're feeling bored you're feeling happy or feeling miserable you're feeling Randy or feeling whatever you're feeling and go to your work and have a conversation with it and that's how I've lived my life it was let Haines who encouraged handling to approach her work with the same Restless curiosity that has stayed with her throughout her career he encouraged experiment experiment experiments I mean everything has to be an experiment otherwise it's dead it was the start of the swinging 60s when handling attended both Camberwell and the Slade schools of art this was a time of radical change and significant new movements in the art world I worked consistently in the life room but I made experiment into op art into pop art into all those things so many things were going on millenials not supposed to remember the 60s but I remember quite a lot of him after leaving art school hambling continued to hone her skills creating a body of primarily figurative work but it wasn't until 1980 that she gained wider recognition when she was chosen as the first-ever artist in residence at the National Gallery in London it was marvellous I was sort of in debt 8 o'clock in the morning before the people of my coast and the evening having unrestricted access to the National Gallery allowed her to produce studies of some of the great works in the collection it also meant that she was exposed to public scrutiny I painted self-portrait as a performing monkey because this was the thing you know the serious things of making the studies from the paintings and what I learned from doing that and then also they know there were posters around say meet a real artist like you know then people are going to come up and poke Ian I mean people thought it was an amazing idea to put a living artist in with all those pictures by dead people it was regarded as pretty controversial from early on in her career Maggi Hambling became renowned for her distinctive approach to portraiture over the years she's painted a range of notable subjects from strangers to larger-than-life personalities like her great friend the London dandy Sebastian horsely this portrait is part of her latest exhibition at the British Museum this drawing was done from the life in my studio or with the Hermes scarf as you see floating around the nakedness of Sebastian and I called him my wicked son because he called me mother and I was very fond of him and he posed for me quite a lot French portrait is a bit like a love affair I mean because it's a very intense thing and at the end of it you hope you hope you know the decent painting will come out of it and not broken heart and it's all about love and so you have to get into this place where all your own baggage has got rid of and the truth the person in front of you could come through you I think the sheer richness of these portraits whether it's Mac's wall looking at early tragic whether it's Stephen Fry falling asleep they're all incredibly tender and they give such a spectrum of emotional engagement in response so you look at them you don't get any one response you really do see these people in a state of sort of psychological flux and change they do live in front of you and that's Maggie's empathy in the portraits there's a sense in which she is touching them through her medium be it Graphite's monotype charcoal or paint but at the same time there's a sense in which the viewer is being invited into that very intimate sometimes indeed erotic encounter with the subject many of handlings muses were close friends family and lovers and the emotional connection between subject and artist continued to inspire her even in their dying moments and beyond I recorded the last almost two weeks of my father's life in Ipswich Hospital sat beside bed with his schedule which now belongs here and that was made the day he died we are very lucky in that they have this arm this in the world the case of someone who dies this positive way of grieving you know so you're doing something positive when inside that's a great whole these are never maudlin they're never sentimental there's a sort of fierceness there a kind of fierce love and a very objective gauge and it's incredibly poignant but never schmaltzy in any way shape or form these are memento mori in a way but they're also gestures of extreme affection and extreme compassion and you know really I think almost unique in contemporary art it's that Humanity in portraiture that handling both strives for herself and is attracted to in the work of other artists there's a self portrait by Rembrandt as a young man I call him Ronnie says that you never see Craig look Shawn you have this human encounter with this little droid and it is just a mastery of the economy and yet the feeling and so you have with any portrait a conversation of visual conversation and this business of the human hand making this set of marks then there's something else going on and destroying them just a pure likeness you do feel it with Maggie that when she's looking at other artists you feel incredible focus forget our criticism the best art criticism is an artist like Maggie looking at another artist and that's that informs the work and it informs the work in an incredibly responsible way the British Museum has been collecting Hamblin's work for over 30 years but portraits are only part of the dazzling range of subject matter and themes on display in this new exhibition Maggi Hambling 'z approach also extends beyond the 2-dimensional and the confines of a gallery [Music] yes British artist Maggi Hambling stands out as a singular and uncompromising force in today's art world although she initially made her name as a painter her prolific and often controversial output defies categorization and embraces a great many different media in 1998 hambling made her first public sculpture a conversation with Oscar Wilde Oscar Wilde cam into my life when his stories for children were read to us my first school and there was this voice from another place he never grew up in some rural Suffolk and suddenly there was this other place this exotic place this extraordinary place this magical place his place of the imagination when it was unveiled on the 30th of November 1998 the sculpture caused quite a stir I thought what some people find difficult and some of Maggie's work is that she just goes full throttle you know and the Oscar Wilde sculpture that calls such a Ferrari I mean there he is Liberty Liberty on the ground it's a very particular view they take no prisoners how works and I think you know in the slightest uptight art world perhaps people find that difficult you don't think of any of these things when you make a thing you know you make the thing goes out into the world and then you know it has to take care of itself and I mean ask awhile said you know this good thing when the critics are divided the artist is of one with himself so either it's all wore off a duck's back [Music] handlings next public sculpture scallop created in 2003 also received a mixed reception inspired by another of her heroes composer Benjamin Britten and pierced with words from his opera Peter Grimes the four metre high steel sculpture is situated on ultra beach in Suffolk it had been in the papers about uber not wanting to recognize its most famous son and it made me quite cross and that's why I decided I was going to try and do something myself I've made it for never had someone bad love affair wandering lamely by the sea thinking about life and death and all those big things there you know that conversation with the good old horizon people tend to have with the sea because it's entirely car company with children which is great you know and lovers have met underneath it and actually people have got married at it and is apparently being kind of funerals that it has become amazingly sort of place and sort of pilgrimage it was also on the Suffolk coast that Maggi Hambling snacks to muse came crashing into her life in a characteristically unexpected and tempestuous fashion on November 30th 2002 I've driven to the sea thought Ness I think in the early morning and there was a huge storm raging the shingle was being tossed I mean this I mean the waves were high that sea was charging and was very exciting and I came back here and what I was actually painting was a little portrait 12 inches by 10 a portrait from memory of a London beggar and what was inside me what was actually entered me that day was this storm and so on that same canvas I turned this little portrait of the beggar into my first little sea painting and then and that has gone on in the North Sea still has me by the short and curlies immersed in her obsession with the sea handling created her walls of water series in 2013 touching on themes that have consistently seeped into all of her work the sea must face a metaphor for life and death and recycling and all that it's also very sexy I mean you see a distant wave gradually from gigabytes approaching approaching pretty until it reaches the shore and then and it's pretty orgasmic when it when it crashes when it dissolves says all that going on they really were amazingly kind of intense avocational the salty sea like sensation but also with maybe emotionally charged and that's how genius I think is that she can combine reality sensation and feeling I like where people see particularly in the walls of water they see animals faces figures and they're not there consciously it's just that when you're really in the zone as a tennis player call it hailey a hundred clue what's going on and that's that you know that's the best state to be in I mean the muse is really present and and something has taken over and so the you know when it's going right it paints itself as a major inspiration the sea has played its part in Maggi Hambling career for over a decade she continues to be acutely sensitive to the world around her and recently has brought her intense gaze to some of the most troubling subjects of our time from international conflicts to global warming [Music] throughout Maggi Hambling x' career she's pushed at the boundaries of what her art can be all the while preoccupied by the fragility of human existence her 2013 visceral installation War Requiem was a confrontational exploration of death and destruction it gave rise to a new ongoing body of work that in its own unique way explores rebirth and resurrection the aftermath series of sculptures are partly inspired by half worn away gargoyles on churches and those ancient little remains and bits of things you see in glass cases in museums that is one piece of wood it's called sleeper and it's one piece of wood I simply added a piece underneath to get the angle of the head right and I encouraged the slit that was already there as mouth aftermath in a way as the aftermath of everything she's done throughout her career she picks up pieces of wood the chief felt were suggestive or interesting or intriguing in some way and then worked into them using plaster creating these strange gargoyle like heads or parts of bodies these strange fragmentary creatures in a way that are then finally painted in multiple coats of oil paints and cast in bronze this just came to be in the edge show entitled politician Shearer Trevor Hollow some of the aftermath sculptures will feature in a forthcoming exhibition in March 2017 called edge but more refine arts in London for this show hambling has also been putting together a brand new series of paintings creating works which allude to the fallout from current conflicts as well as addressing the vulnerability of the natural world this object is the melting of the ice caps which I'm convinced is going on and which absurds me I hope there is the sensation of the ice melting in front of your eyes the war in Syria and its repercussions have been at the forefront of Maggie's mind it's called a trafficker drifting and they went through many stages and there were a lot of little people in the boat when it started and they gradually went it's what Yeats called a terrible beauty and you need beauty to drive your engagement with the painting it feels like Maggie's grabbing you by the arm pulling you in and stabbing her finger and said look so if one is looking at the obscenity of a bombed Aleppo that this isn't a description of that but it is a description of the emotions that are pulled out of us viscerally as a consequence of that I remember Liza thus late I had a friend who was writing a book whether I mean whether it look was ever finished I didn't know but that I remember the title was peace the impossible concept and it's a very good title because you know wherever you look I mean one war may be over but another five or six started and war seems to be a constant presently one it's a medieval torture his friend five decades on Maggi Hambling still refuses to be pinned down whether it's in drawings paintings sculptures or installations she continues to put all her energy and passion into her arts following her muse wherever it may lead her what I love about her is that she's been a kind of consistent irritant she's a bit edgy and she's a bit difficult and she's a bit hard to categorize which they said was not me you can hold her up against anything that's being made to get today and and because you know it kind of comes from this place of integrity that even if you didn't like it and even if it looked to you a little bit it brings you into an understanding of what our might be able to do she's an important artist and an artist who will have longevity because she has throughout her career ignored fashion ignored what's cool what's considered a given moment by the art world perhaps to be important and has absolutely pursued her own path not in ignorance or obliviousness of what other people think but with an absolute faith in the meaning and importance of what she does I think what marks Maggie out is that she has two such incredible humanity empathy and an ability to get the essence of the subject whether it's max Hall whether it's a wave you kind of feel they really are there because she's put every inch of herself into I don't understand any of this business but I mean if I did I don't think it'd be a lot of point in doing it you know you'll be attempting the impossible that's the point really [Music] eople brilliant ideas powered by Hyundai Motor people in the

Channel: Bloomberg Originals

Views: 290,487

Keywords: Bloomberg, Maggi Hambling, Touch, Oscar Wilde, London, British Museum, National Portrait Gallery

Id: PUpHYUt_Zyo

Length: 24min 12sec (1452 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 07 2017