‘Time is eating away at one’s life’

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 there in front of me. Empty myself and try to take the subject in, and then go back and work from memory. But for the last couple of years I’ve taken a sketchbook with me, to get myself tuned in, like a pianist doing the scales.’

We are talking about drawing because this is the theme of a small but well-chosen touring exhibition of her work, called No Straight Lines, which has just opened at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. (It’s there until 29 April, then moves on to the Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, 9 May–10 June, before travelling to Abbot Hall in Kendal, 6 November–21 December.