(Above) Maggi Hambling, Winter Wave Crashing, 2010. Image © Maggi Hambling.
Exhibition: Maggi Hambling - The Wave, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, until August 8 2010.
Be prepared when walking into Maggi Hambling's new show of sea paintings at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The size and power of these stunning waves apparently crash over you, as if to subsume you in their wake.
Indeed, Hambling tells of a recent showing of these seascapes at The Lowry in Salford when one of the attendants had to leave the gallery as they made her feel seasick.
The artist's key moment is just before the waves are about to break. "I make the waves crash against the canvas and hope that the waves crash in front of you as you see it," she explains.
Hambling’s raw and visceral treatment gives the waves human and animal characteristics.
"The sea has many moods. It can sometimes be a raging beast and at other times it seems to laugh at you," she says.
Hambling’s obsession with waves began in November 2002 when she was making the 12 ft high steel sculpture, Scallop. The shell like monument on Aldeburgh beach, Suffolk, is a tribute to Benjamin Britten, the Lowestoft-born composer.
Maggi Hambling sketching on the Suffolk shore. Image © Chris Newson
“I dreamt about the sea raging earlier that morning. I happened to be painting a London beggar from memory and storms were raging. I said to myself, ‘what are you doing, doing a beggar from memory when you can paint the raging of the storm in front of you,’” she recalls.
Now every morning she has to look at the sea before she starts to paint.
Yet even in childhood there were affinities to the sea. "When I was a toddler, I remember walking into the sea and talking to it like a friend," she says
"I do for the Suffolk sea what Constable does for the sky," she says, preferring the 18th century landscape painter to that other famous British sea painter, JMW Turner, because of their Suffolk connection.
The area is very dear to Hambling’s heart. She was born there - in Hadleigh, a market town, close to the Essex border in 1945 and trained at the Ipswich School of Art before moving to London’s Camberwell, then Slade Schools of Fine Art (1964-1969). Her reputation was soon cemented as the first Artist-in-Residence at the National Gallery, London (1980-1). Now she splits her time between her homes in Suffolk and Lambeth, London.
Admission free. Open 10am-5pm Tuesday to Saturday (from 12 noon on Sunday). Maggi Hambling: New Sea Sculpture, Paintings and Etchings can also be seen at Marlborough Fine Art, London, until June 5 2010.
