Maggi Hambling Reviews
Free spirit: Maggi Hambling on art, taboos and political correctness
The Big Interview by Christina Patterson, The Independent
George Always: Portraits of George Melly by Maggi Hambling is at the Walker Arts Gallery, Liverpool, 27 February to 31 May
George Melly Singing by Maggi Hambling
"Gazing at the paintings in the catalogue on the bus to Hambling's south London home, I actually gasped. Here, in the studio, they give me gooseflesh. They feel, in a way, like the climax of Hambling's career so far. The artist who produced deeply compassionate portraits of old men and women in pubs, and see-straight-to-the-core ones of people like Max Wall, Derek Jarman and Stephen Fry, and moving drawings and paintings of her father on his deathbed, and of her great love, Henrietta Moraes, on hers, and sculptures of strange creatures and lips and laughs, and landscapes, and seascapes, and sunsets and sunrises, seems to have produced a series of paintings in which all these things meld and ebb and flow together, in a celebration of art, a celebration of life." Extract from The Independent. For full article click here.
Maggi Hambling's Fine Art prints of Derek Jarman, George Melly and Sephen Fry as well as selected works such as sunrises & sunsets, laughs and drawings are currently on display at our gallery IAP Fine Art, London.
Maggi Hambling was interviewed about the Francis Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain on BBC Radio 4's 'Front Row', the live magazine programme on the world of arts, literature, film, media and music.
Maggi Hambling was interviewed on BBC Radio 4 'Broadcast House' programme concerning her paintings & sculpture inspired by the North Sea.
Maggi Hambling's 'Scallop' plus interview with the artist was featured on television on The One Show, BBC1.
Battle of Britten rages on the Beach
It was designed to honour the composer. But after a four-year campaign of attacks, the sculpture's future is now in doubt. Click article's title to view article.
Caroline Davies
The Observer
'Lunch With the FT: Maggi Hambling'
To read this interview over lunch with The Financial Times' journalist Rebecca Rose (published 8th January 2008. Click the title of article above to read.
'A Life In Pictures' an interview with Maggi Hambling by Lynn Barber in The Observer 2nd December 2007.
To view please click here: http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,,2220326,00.html
The Spectator, 'Time is eating away at one's life', article by Andrew Lambirth
"I’m talking to Maggi Hambling in the downstairs studio of her south London home, because her beautifully light upstairs painting space is being given a new coat of white paint, the first for years. She always says that if she ever comes to sell this house the agents can market it as having ‘four reception rooms, two bathrooms and a ballroom. No bedrooms’. It’s a misleading description of the Hambling lifestyle: work is the order of the day, not partying, and the ballroom is of course the main studio. Hambling is not out on the tiles every night, but is more likely to retire to bed early in order to rise before dawn. She got into the habit when she was obsessively painting the sunrise in the 1980s; these days, her subject is primarily the North Sea, where it meets that bit of the Suffolk coastline Hambling has known all her life, around Aldeburgh and Thorpeness.
She owns a cottage near Saxmundham set in a large expanse of water meadow. Whenever she’s there, she gets up early to draw the sea, before anyone else is about. ‘When I began the sea pictures in November 2003, I would just look at what was in front of me. Empty myself and try to take the subject in, and then go back and work from memory......."
Sunday Times Magazine, Sue Fox interviewed Maggi Hambling for the regular feature 'A Life In A Day'. MH: "When I painted George Melly, he said I would come round the corner of the canvas like an escaped mink. He could tell if it was going well because otherwise I'd stamp my foot in fury. I'd have loved to have painted Christ. I'd have loved the chance to paint Oscar Wilde...."
Country Life magazine said of Maggi Hambling: * 'No Straight Lines' at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.....confirms her place as a draughtsman of distinction, and should not be missed.'*
In rave reviews for her recent sell-out exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art and the monograph MAGGI HAMBLING THE WORKS and Conversations with Andrew Lambirth (published January 2006, Unicorn Press), Maggi Hambling was said to have “succeeded where Leonardo failed” (Brian Sewell, Evening Standard) and was referred to as “the female Bacon” (The Art Newspaper).
