These days I'm not quite the honorary Londoner I almost became a few years ago with my quite regular visits, my own Oyster card and my belief that I knew where I was and knew where I was going (until I got lost). It can be a trial for the visitor of advancing years who is more accustomed to the sedate provinces and so it needs to be something worth coming for to entice me into the maelstrom of activity. Vibrant it might be but the enjoyment is entirely in arriving at one's destination and not in getting there. But new paintings by Maggi Hambling are an event worth investigating, with her being such a star in my firmament.
One might say it's more of the same after the sea paintings and waterfalls but these 'walls' might be fountains, some of them, and they are mostly the frayed edges of jostling water rather than the walls of the long, narrower canvasses of the waterfalls. (In fact they are the spray as waves hit the sea wall which explains the lines near the bottom of them). There is more or less white canvas in each of them, with no attempt to put in the skies that informed the sea paintings with the possibility of a moon. These are only the water and if one thinks to mention Jackson Pollock it might be best to think again because whereas Jack was about the paint and some 'energy' in his abstraction, these are figurative paintings.
They are the tops of waves, perhaps the tops of fountains where we get not only the surging power of water caught in different ranges of tone but the loose threads of spray where water fades into air. And, as with Maggi's previous such exhibitions, a lot of time looking at them is spent finding the animals, faces and figures that have occurred. I noted druids, shrouded figures, eyes, crying faces, pelican, serpent, razorbill (or cormorant or some such sea bird), seals, orchids and ghosts without trying too hard and I'm no ornithologist. But this is only a game suggested as you stare into the paint when the overall effect is surely of frantic power and coruscating nature, if you want to use words like 'coruscating'.
The paintings are dated 2011 and move into 2012 and are numbered and exhibited in roughly that order. Some reds, maroon, pink and orange come into the later pictures where the earlier had more blue/grey, black and any amount of hints of other shades on closer inspection. But whereas the titles are simply Wall of water plus a roman numeral and one finds in them almost whatever one wants to find, there is the smaller canvas entitled Wall of water, Amy Winehouse (above) in which you might find Amy represented a number of times or not at all. Or you might Russell Brand. Oh, yes, that is certainly a black bee-hive hairdo, there's a face, there's a profile and there might be a leg and possibly even some blood but, there again, there might not be. The last thing you should ever do is actually say anything definitive about art, you just suggest things, like the art does, if you feel like it. There is nothing to be gained from making such wooden observations as that Love is a Losing Game and here is the bleary, smeared, dripping evidence. I don't think it means that at all. Not even that Amy is a ghost lost in the savage, overwhelming forces of unrelenting despair. No, honestly, it isn't that either.
Downstairs in the Espresso Bar (oh, no, I don't think I've ever been in an espresso bar before) are the monotypes, 'zinc plates covered in black printing ink' that Maggi removed with fingers, brushes, solvent,
drawing with light into dark,
she says and that's fine but Maggi herself has said in my hearing that a painting is finished 'when it is sold'; I heard Peter Phillips (The Tallis Scholars) in the summer speaking about the economic necessities - rather than niceties- of touring Renaissance choral music and so it's a shame but professional artists have their bills to pay like we do and work like this, one regrets even thinking, is done to sell to those who can't afford an oil painting but want a Hambling. Well, I want a Hambling all of my own (Broken Moon, to be specific) but I wouldn't buy one of these. And neither, really, would I want the responsibility of looking after one or the guilt of depriving the public of it by having it on my front room wall. The monotypes are quite brilliantly done when you consider how they have been produced- it's just that they are nowhere near as interesting to look at as the 'real thing'.
And so I used the rest of my time paying homage to the Vermeer, to Carel Fabritius, and very much enjoyed coming across Two Tax Gatherers, probably 1540's, Workshop of Marinus van Reymerswale. To think that the genius who produced that is only remembered thus.
And then, I happened to be passing a betting office and noticed that it was time for the Hennessey Gold Cup to be finishing and so I saw the last mile (with absolutely no sight of Rocky Creek) but checked and found that Irving had won the Fighting Fifth hurdle at Newcastle and so, whatever else happened, I had made a few bob while I'd been absent from my enormously comfortable settee.