Maggi Malcontent

To Marlborough Fine Art for for Maggi Hambling's 'Portraits of People and the Sea'.

I love the way Maggi Hambling handles paint, and I love these gushing spurting seascapes off the Suffolk coast. They should be handing out sowesters at the doors.

The 'wet room' gives way to rows of portraits: David Sylvester, John Berger, Sebastian Horsley, Stephen Fry, Sir Michael Gambon. Some a bit muddy and dark for me. I prefer her portraits when she leaves acres of blank canvas, with just a head and body painted in detail and almost thrown on the bare canvas like clay on a potters wheel. No background, no situation, just a buzzing life bursting with personality and covered in feathering brushstrokes that twist and turn. Her last show at Marlborough of her late lover Henrietta Moraes (a pennyless veteran of old Soho who modeled for Bacon) had that focus on the person to the exclusion of all else. They were pictures of a dying alcoholic, and they were painted with love and with sadness, and the pictures were just of HER and that was it. Bare backrounds, in shades of coffin brown.

There are a couple of self-portraits here that have that heartbreaking sense of isolation, with no back-up clues or narrative. She paints herself glowering out at the viewer, sometimes with hostility and sometimes with depression. There's always a fag in her mouth and a can of special brew. She paints herself surrounded by a miasma, a painted confusion of concerns and predicaments like she's being attacked by her own emotions in an empty room. You want to go to her but the eyes keep the viewer at arms length which is just as it should be.

The back room is filled with drawings... there are some VERY sexy drawings of actress Amanda Barrie from Corrie, clearly the model with the mostest (that was probably a rather racy afternoon!). I've noticed she's much kinder to her models than she is to herself... I think it was Bacon who said he could only ever inflict 'the damage' that art does on his own portrait, and never on those he loved.

I met Maggi once. We were both taking part in a group show at the ICA and being only 20 at the time I hovered nearby in the hope of an introduction (I did a lot of that in those days) whilst she was talking to Justin Fashanu, the gay footballer who hung himself shortly afterwards in a Shoreditch alley (not that evening I hasten to add). Maggi was asking him if he would model for her, but they didn't have a pen to swap numbers. Maggi's eyes alighted on me:-

MH: *grandly*:- 'AH!... this looks like the sort of YOUNG MAN who might have a PEN on him!'
SH: 'Hello Maggi, well yes I do actually... here you are...'
MH: 'Do I know you?' [if she'd have been wearing spectacles she'd have peered over them]
SH: 'Well, no not really. My name's Stephen, Stephen Harwood. I'm a painter - '
MH: 'AH YES! I know you... you write me letters about your work!'
SH: 'Well yes well I - '
*hands back pen*
MH: 'Thank you Young Man' *turns back on me*

Shortly afterwards she was lead out by her agent, cigarette flaming and looking as fussed as a hollywood starlet being harrassed by a crowd of adoring fans... At the time she was a panellist on a brilliant cultural game show called 'Gallery', which was produced by my late friend Dan Farson and presented by George Melly on Channel Four. Frank Whitford from The Times had one team and Maggi the other, with two guests each. The idea was the teams were shown details of paintings and they had to guess them and discuss the answers. Maggi frequently appeared on TV in 'man drag' or a false moustache, and was the toast of London at the time. I remember being at parties and people saying 'oh my god, Maggi Hambling's over there she's just such a great CLASS A DYKE of the highest order! MY DEAR! So CAMP! Let me introduce you !!!' ... Er... no thanks luv, been there, been told to fuck off....

She was being playful of course, camping it up and probably enjoying her new-found status as a minor celeb but I never minded. I saw the real her tons of times. In her work.