Maggi Hambling

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 18 December 2005

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the artist Maggi Hambling. Above all else, she is known as a painter of people. Over the past 30 years she has painted George Melly, Stephen Fry and Michael Gambon among many others. But in the early years, her subjects were not well known; instead they were characters she saw on the streets or in the bars of South London. People whose faces she would commit to memory so that she could draw them when she returned to her studio.

She was the first artist to be given a residency at the National Gallery and in 1995 won the Jerwood Prize. But although she remains in great demand as a portrait painter, her work provokes controversy too - her tribute to Benjamin Britten, an enormous scallop shell standing on the shore at Aldeburgh, continues to divide opinion in the town.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2005, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is an artist. She was taught at an early age to take her profession seriously.
0:35.0	She makes her work her best friend, getting up early and painting or sculpting until the light has gone.
0:41.0	She's a figurative artist and her pictures can be seen among other places in the
0:44.8	National Portrait Gallery and in the National Gallery where she was the very first artist in residence
0:49.5	25 years ago. Although she enjoys laughter a lot, her work is often preoccupied with death.
0:56.7	She drew her mother, her father, and her lover in their decline and in death, and one of her
1:01.4	most celebrated and controversial sculptures is of Oscar Wilde
1:05.2	rising from his coffin, smoking and laughing.
1:08.9	The most real time for me, she says, is when I'm working.
1:12.4	The rest, she adds in a rather Shakespearean phrase is just the rest she is Maggie
1:17.5	Hambling it's an all-consuming business then this Maggie is it but if it's your best friend your work your art then it's
1:24.8	no great hardship I presume well someone once said to me that one's never
1:29.9	alone when one's working and unless the work is one's best friend I think one might
1:36.8	as well not do it it has to be the absolute priority of life. So you can go to it whatever you're feeling. You don't have to be in
1:44.2	the mood for work. It is like a best friend. You go when you're
1:46.9	miserable or when you're happy. When you're miserable, whether you're
1:49.3	bored, whether you're tired, whether you're Randy, whatever you're feeling, you can go to your work and have a conversation with it.
1:55.0	Sometimes I can work on a painting for two, three, four months
1:59.0	and then have to destroy it.
2:01.0	And that painting can happen in a morning, but it couldn't happen unless
	...

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