Watch Maggi Hambling, Oldie Finest Artist, accept her award, here:
Maggi Hambling’s favourite writer is Richmal Crompton, and she shares her hero William Brown’s love of mischief and immediacy. You can’t be in her presence, or, indeed, in the presence of one of her paintings, without feeling that little bit more alive and kicking.
She is the enemy of boredom and piety. I remember going with her to see the film 12 Years a Slave soon after it was first released. It was one of those very long, very earnest films that had been praised, in reverential tones, by the critics.
‘My God!’ Maggi exclaimed in a very loud voice as we emerged. ‘That felt more like 40 years!’
The first time I ever set eyes on her was in the 1980s, when she was a team leader on a wonderful TV quiz show with the dull title Gallery. It was hosted by her friend – and fellow fun-lover – George Melly. Maggi would dress for the occasion in a dinner jacket and bow tie, and once topped it off with a false moustache.
A colourful parade of special guests – Ian Dury, Denis Healey, Jill Bennett, Joanna Lumley, Vincent Price – would be asked to identify a particular painting from a tiny detail. Maggi not only had an unbelievably sharp eye – identifying a Cranach from a leaf, a Velázquez from an upturned spoon – but also could speak off the cuff, with great knowledge and enthusiasm, about the qualities that defined each artist.
After Melly died, she spent two years painting pictures of him. She may see art as a form of resurrection. ‘I still hear him laugh, tell jokes and sing, wherever he may be.’
She also painted a captivating series of pictures of the angular, neglected stand-up comic Max Wall. They capture perfectly the way Max, like so many great comedians, danced on the thin, unsteady rope that lies between the comic and the tragic.
Now aged 80, Maggi is still going at full blast. She is in her studio – or by the North Sea with her sketch book – by 6am every day.
A few years ago, she fell down the stairs with a glass in her hand, and the glass cut through the little finger of her right hand. Though there was blood everywhere, she picked up a brush with her left hand and carried on painting.
At last year’s Charleston Festival, she showed her right hand to the audience. ‘Most people have four fingers. You’ll notice I have one – two – three.’ After a while, her little finger had turned black, she said, ‘and began to stink, so I had to have it off.’
A friend had informed her, she added, of a sunny side: she might now be eligible for Prince Harry’s Invictus Games.
I love her for her indomitability, the slight nervousness she shields with abrasiveness and her fierce commitment to art – she still teaches a devoted class at Morley College, every week.
And I salute her, too, for her love of comedy, often dark black. When her mother was still alive, Maggi would often try to paint her, but she would never sit still, fiddling with her hair and saying, ‘Are you finished yet?’
After she died, and was lying in her coffin, Maggi took out her sketch book.
‘Gotcha, Mother,’ she remembers saying. ‘You’re not going anywhere now.’
Craig Brown is author of A Voyage Around the Queen
