YouSaid · the spoken record

Maggi Hambling

lines on the record: 37
first: 2005-12-18
most recent: 2005-12-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“The complete works of Just William by Rich McCrompton I was identified with William and when the deepest moments of doom and gloom I can take out a just William book and they still make me laugh, and he somehow finds a way whatever is against him William gets there in the end Hero Yes my luxury the wine cellars of All Souls Oxford, which are Some people don't know this, but in the wine cellars of also Oxford there's a long legged blonde serving the drinks, I wouldn't be quite on my own on the desert island.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly not. I'm not philosophical about it I'm afraid of it. Don't know where we're going, do it. My favourite film by a million miles is some like a hot. And I've chosen this record, as I think it's for me it's one of Marilyn Munro's greatest manifestations. wiggles up Carriage carrying the band to the millionaire's resort. I did know that she had one heel, one shoe always higher than the other to increase the wobble. I mean, not very good for the back, very good for the bank balance, I think, so good for the back. But I mean, what a sexy image that is, because she was really curly then. And she comes up that aisle singing.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not at all Well, there Whichever saint it was, who said make me good but not yet. I mean not yet not yet I mean the weather's where we're so lucky as a painter's poets writers I mean so lucky we you know we don't retire we don't have to stop you know we go on and on and on we hope until we dine with a brush or something in our hand”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They do, they do, they sit over. They sit on Oscar. They sit on it, lovers make love underneath it, children climb all over it.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of them still are rather surprisingly, I thought, you know, being a bit slow, I really thought that the people of Aubor would be grateful to me for making this contemporary celebration of their greatest son, for goodness sake. And it came very sort of simply from the simple idea of when you're a child you hold a shell to your ear and you can hear the sounds of the sea. And that's how it began, and then a lot of”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You say emotions who, I say fact. There's no getting away from it. Is there? It's one thing that we can't deny. The biggest mystery, I mean the greatest works of art have that quality in a great work of art I think you know what it is to be alive and you also get a bit of sense with what it is to die. I mean I think it's really good Mexico, you know, sort of debt as a friend, and just the other half of life, the other side of the coin. We sort of shove it all underground, shove it away here, pretend it doesn't happen. And it does. Record number seven Benjamin My friend Keith Milo played the war requiem quite a lot in our flat in Greenwich in the sixties. and I shall never forget the sort of electricity that went through me the first time I heard his music, and I think it's what happens if you're in the presence of genius.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't want to leave someone to you, I mean if they are, if you can clearly see that they're in the process if you like, of leaving you.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A strange beauty, I mean, my mother was quite ill towards the end of her life and all that sort of pain had gone from the face, and she's smiling, I mean, almost smiling, I mean, still very much there, if you are very close to someone, and I mean they happen to have died, but I mean they're going to go on inside you. I mean, that's something to do with love, isn't it? That, I mean, they go on inside you.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For an artist, I mean the most natural thing in the world. I mean, with my mother, she was very bad at posing when she was alive. She would arrange her hands. We'd start to do a drawing and she'd have her spectacles on and she'd take them off. And then she'd say, have you finished after about three minutes? So, you know, when I drew my mother in her coffin, I did sort of say to myself, Gotcha now, mother, not going anywhere now, Anne.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With her when she died Reddy Cross and said, Look, you need the doctor, you're really ill. At least can I telephone your doctor? So I telephoned the doctor. and went over to the sink for some reason and then came back. She said, Come here, give me a hug and another cigarette. And she actually died on the telephone to her doctor, cracking a joke. A marvellous way to die, a lesson in die. This glorious bit of nerd takes me back to Henrietta in every way because there are a great many possibilities of what to fall in love with in this record and Henrietta, I think, had and did most of them.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In one of her obituaries, there was the line that moderation was unknown to her. My father's funeral had been on a Monday, beginning of ninety eight, and on Wednesday there was a dinner at the Haywood following the opening of a bacon show, and as I was going to leave, there she was by the door and she sort of spread out her arms and there was this great beauty and sort of force of nature saying When am I coming to dinner? And the funny thing was at the time she only had one tooth. Not going to be much dinner, but anyway, in due course she came and I was working on my portraits of father laughing, father flirting, the big heads of my father after he died, and her My dog, Bercy, began to roder her dog Max, and she looked across the studio and said Oh good, they're getting on all right.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“she'd led her life, you know, depends on your idea of life. She was a liver, and in the end it was her liver that got her, but I mean,”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, as I'm sure you know, she's the queen of Soho in the fifties and a hippie in the sixties. She was painted by Francis Bacon, ah, I think sixteen times. And Freud a bit in the early part of it yes, and she was, I mean, a very great beauty, and a very strong personality and”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“five Beethaven String Quartet early seventies I was opened up by someone who became a muse and encouraged me to paint people, again, having been through a lot of experiments at the Slade. And on very classical music. I think she tried to raise the tone of my taste a bit, and she gave me this record. I don't know if it's worked.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my studio was a converted children's sandwich room with no windows, and as I smoked in those glorious days, they had entirely encased the inside of the room with tin foil, so I felt rather like a reading made meal, you know. Anyway, the notices around the gallery said a real artist, you know, and sort of like one was a bit of a monkey, you know, inviting people to come along to poke your clothing or something. Anyway, on a Wednesday afternoon, the public arrived at four o'clock outside my studio. I took them down into the collection and around half a dozen paintings that I loved and which I talked to them about while I loved them, and then we came back up to the studio, and inevitably every Wednesday afternoon this German lady would ask me if I saw Auras. Every Wednesday it was like a punishment.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“which I thought was a bit greedy of her, I mean my sister married with three sons, my brother married with a son, I mean I think she was being rather greedy. But what sorted her out was being such a church person she went away on a weekend retreat to a monastery somewhere, and she went into the room or the cell, I suppose, and very bravely said I have one daughter, one son, but the third daughter is, and she said That's rather embarrassing word, I far prefer the word dike lesbian. And so the monk was obviously A civilized person than anything else about the monk, said I do hope you haven't ever held it against her. Let us kneel down and pray that she meets people whom she will love and so that sorted her out.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Believe it or not, as a virgin, and I sort of thought I'd better do something about this. It was rather embarrassing. I'd made my mother buy a full-length black leather coat, a lot of makeup. I'd dyed my hair crimson, wore her fox fur around my neck. In fact, looked like the Madame of a brothel, and in the first year the other girls came to me for advice on contraception. I really cannot imagine. What I instructed them to do. However. I had a sort of list of pretty basic kind of possibilities of who one might go to bed with and so there was a younger man, older man, black man, woman. I worked my way through the list eventually at the end of the first year of Camberwell. I like the ladies best, so this is Dotty Springfield, and the memory of the Gateways Club in the King's Road, and a lot of hot, sweaty dancing. She was not too pleased”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was the one whose work was. extraordinarily imaginative he's the person that said to me make your work your best friend but he had rather given his life to the making Cedric's career with his extraordinary artist in his own right. from that to London, said Was London, it was the sixties, I was one of the privileged people to be an odd student in swinging London, and I had arrived in London nearly nineteen.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was run by Let Haines and Cedric Morris and so I took my first to Suffolk landscapes, my first to oils one summer evening and let came to the door he was very frightening and I said Is Sir Cedric Boris at home please and he said Cedric Morris is having dinner like that I said may I wait because I wasn't going to go away and I went in and there was a long table and Cedric was sitting at the end and Cedric was very chatty and giggly and nice and then Led said I suppose you'll stood at school and I said yes and he said Well perhaps you'd better come along pains in the holidays so the first day of the holidays I was there but I was too scared to go up the bit of drive and I sat in the ditch outside the gates and the paint of the ditch until someone eventually came and found me.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was an art exam at school when I was fourteen, and and I'd done nothing. during the time except flick painted people and generally draw attention to myself because I was deeply in love with the biology mistress in vigilating, and then I sort of happened to see the clock and it was twenty past three and I realized that at half past three we had to hand some paintings in so there were three subjects and I chose laziness and I painted a woman lying on a chaise long with a book half open in other words you know she was too lazy even to read Anyway so I did this painting in ten minutes and then when the results came out two or three weeks later I was top of art and I thought this is a very strange business you don't have to try and you're good at it you know it's a sort of began to look into it”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But, you know, brought us together if I hadn't loved him as much as I did, I would then think I would have stopped work on my wild sculpture and painted him after he died for about three months. and my mother was a great church person she organized all the flower festivals and ran the mother's union and that kind of thing and say this is a bit for her and a bit for a very close friend of mine who it always causes to cry and I think very few people can remain untouched there shouldn't be a dry eye in the house after this one”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In later life he has, and what brought us together was when he began to paint, and I'd left Camberwell and he retired from the bank and I gave him some paints, and five years later when he was sixty five quite nothing to do with me, he suddenly decided one morning to take out the paints and he started to paint. He turned out to be a completely natural painter. I organized, I think, seven shows for him. In Suffolk, everything we once shared together I sold one he sold a lot.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ya, yeah, he had close male friends. became aware in my teens, and it was extraordinary to think of my father. who had been the very graft distant person, you'll say, had an extremely feminine side.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is behind the daily telegraph very gruff person and rather a stranger. Out of the house a lot of the time and doing other things”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very conventional The theatre was very important to both of them my father was rather in the distance when I was a child my mother was rather more mother and father to me, but my moments of seeing father in a very marvellous and glamorous light was when he performed in the Hadley Dramatic Society. He was very, very good on the stage. My mother had a taste for charades and really wanted home life to be a bit like an earl card play, you know. They had completely opposite senses of humour, and at breakfast it was a bit like being with Punch and Judy.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Perfectly natural, though my mother deserves very obstinate, and I think there's nothing wrong with a little bit of perversity”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ah, well, I think he guessed when my mother came back with me from Sudbury where I'd been born to Hadley as a baby. He stood there and she had to confess that I was a girl rather than a boy, but he chose really to ignore that sort of technicality and brought me up as a brother. I mean we did carpentry I was once given a doll and that was carved up pretty quickly in the woodshed and it was much more useful for lady life really to know a bit about carpentry and wringing chickens next. So I was a bit surprised when he sort of got into his teens he started sort of practising French kissing on me because it didn't quite go with the carpentry but you know that's how it is full of surprises.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think possibly something to do with wearing bayties. I really wouldn't know. Anyway, they became, because of that, three series of that extraordinary business, ten programs in five days, and a lot of vodka. They remain to my greatest friends, and it's a sweet, real love song.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is George Singing Yes, it is a sweet song, especially written by John Chiltern, for George and his girlfriend Squeaky, I meant Squeaky in the eighties making the Art Quiz Gallery when George was the host, and I was rather odd team captain and always lost and turned.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's more, I mean, when someone is alive and sitting or standing there in front of me, then it's more simple, I suppose. But if I'm painting someone after they're dead, then it's because I'm inhabited by them That's a different matter.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I wouldn't take on a commission to paint someone with whom I felt no rapport. And certainly about Stephen Fry, I found the optimism, the wit in the right eye, and the sense of tragedy and what can happen in life in the left eye. It's very complicated. I mean, that's part of the point, the truth of the person. I try to empty myself, become a channel for the truth of the person in front of me to come through me onto the canvas or in front of me.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think I painted quite a contrasting lot of people. I can't imagine anyone much more different from George Melly than, for instance, Dorothy Hodgkin, the scientist. in a life's rich pageant as Arthur Marshall called it is very important to me and the challenge of painting very different people. There was no plan to get I tried to get what's inside the person. into the bronze or into the paint.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm going to take Michael McLaremore, the Queen of Ireland Delivering A little bit of conversation between Lady Bracknell and John Worthing from the importance of being Oscar.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, his stories for children were read to us at my first school in Hadley in Suffolk, and I heard this voice which came to come from another place, and so a picture of Dorian Gray was the first novel I read at the age of twelve. I think it may have had some effect.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's very important to me that my peace for Oscar Wilde is down on our level. I think a lot of people think of him as a dilettante, not in touch with humanity, and he was a great humanitarian. And as it's a portrait of Oscar, I think that you enter into a conversation with that person, a visual conversation. There is a common humanity and that confrontation, that conversation is what interests me in great portraits. What it is I try to do in my own work.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“miserable, where you're bored, with your tired, whether you're randy, whatever you're feeling, you can go to your work, and have a conversation with it. Sometimes I can work on a painting for two, three, four months, and then have to destroy it, and that painting can happen in a morning, but it couldn't happen unless I. done that piece of rubbish before it can happen.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How once said to me that one's never alone when one's working, and unless the work is one's best friend, I think one might as well not do it. It has to be the absolute priority of life.”
2005-12-18 · Desert Island Discs · Maggi Hambling · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source