A life in pictures

Maggi Hambling won't thank me for saying so, but she seems to have become less terrifying in what she insists on calling her 'approaching middle age' - she is 62. When she used to appear on Gallery, the telly art quiz, in the Eighties, she looked like a goth and barked like a brigadier. Once, she also wore a moustache - she got the make-up girls to match her hair perfectly so that it looked really convincing. 'My father had a moustache and I thought, I'll give it a whirl, you know. I looked just like him.' She enjoyed being 'a gay icon' on television and missed the attention when it stopped, but: 'Apparently I am one again!' she guffaws. 'A lot of people have said so. But everything is so fickle, isn't it? And actually completely irrelevant.'

She never 'came out' as gay because she was never in. And anyway she hates the words gay and lesbian - 'Why not say queer or homosexual? I think of myself as queer.' But she believes that her father, a Suffolk bank manager, was also 'queer' or at any rate bisexual - he 'secretly blossomed into femininity when in the company of an ex-farm labourer who helped him in the garden'.

She witnessed a couple of incidents, but never mentioned them to anyone until one Christmas, after a few drinks, she told her older brother and sister: 'They just roared with laughter and said, "Yes of course, didn't you know?" And I'd been carrying this great heavy secret. I don't really like words like masculine and feminine, but my father was much more feminine - although he had a moustache - and my mother was much more masculine. I think it was quite a trial for my mother to be married to my father. She told my sister later on that if she'd had money of her own, she would have left him when she was pregnant with me.' Why then, particularly? 'Well I suppose he was getting a little fonder of the boys!' Was her mother ever unfaithful? 'Oh no no, no! My mother was a pillar of the church, and the Mothers' Union.'

We are in Hambling's house in Clapham, south London, which is as dark and cluttered as a souk downstairs, with a sinister plant she calls Esmeralda throwing evil green tendrils round the room. Dimly through the aqueous gloom, I can see wonderful paintings, masks, sculptures, animal skins, but it is all a bit overwhelming. 'I'm not keen on minimalism,' she says unnecessarily.

It is a relief to go upstairs to her bright, light studio, where she urges me to smoke because she says she loves the smell. She had to give up two years ago, she explains, because: 'I'd always said in this airy way, "Oh I'll give up at 59", because that's when my father gave up and he lived to 95, and if I'd kept quiet I wouldn't have had to do it, but I do try to do what I say I'm going to do.' Did it have any ill effects? 'Yes - this!' she says, slapping her stomach. 'When they say it goes in a year, they lie. And my voice has got higher, which I hate - it used to be very deep.' Anyway, she still insists on being photographed with a cigarette and keeps a fake one for the purpose.

She apologises that her studio is almost bare because most of her recent work has gone up to Abbot Hall, Kendal, for her current show; it includes a great suite of her Suffolk sea paintings, as well as a wonderful collection of life drawings. But her studio still contains some interesting works in progress, especially several portraits of her great friend George Melly, painted from memory after his death. One of them shows him on his sickbed, talking, smoking, rolling about, with his kaftan rucked up over his balls. 'He was moving, moving, moving. He never stopped talking for a minute and he'd grown a beard because he was convinced he'd been asked to play Christ in a forthcoming film of the life of Christ.'

Until Melly died, she was obsessed with painting the North Sea near her Suffolk cottage and she is still 'utterly involved' with doing that. 'But then something happens like George dying, and he really was one of my very closest friends, so I have to do something about it.'

Melly always joked that she should be known as 'Coffin' Hambling because she was so keen on drawing people dying or dead; even her Charing Cross memorial to Oscar Wilde shows him rising from his coffin. I must say I really hate that work, but there is an unforgettable sequence of drawings of her father dying (owned by the British Museum and reproduced as a facsimile sketchbook) and another similar sequence of her great love Henrietta Moraes, published as a book, Maggi & Henrietta, in 2001.

Dying people seem to be her great theme? 'Yes, but I don't know why that surprises anyone, because it's the most natural thing in the world to me. The first person I drew in their coffin was my mother and it sort of helped a bit. Also the marvellous thing was that for once, she was still, instead of fiddling with her spectacles. And then the old lady who lived next door died in hospital and I was with her when she died. I was sitting there holding her hand, and a nurse came along after quite a long while and said, "Actually, there's no point in your sitting there - she's gone." Isn't that a wonderful word - gone? I didn't know what moment she'd gone, but it was the first time I was with someone when they died and I was pretty stunned and couldn't get it out of my head. So a friend suggested, "Well, paint it, paint it." So I did and it helped.

'And then with my father - he was in hospital for the last 10 days of his life and I sat by his bedside drawing him, and then drew him again in the chapel of rest. And Henrietta, of course...' Her affair with Henrietta Moraes lasted less than a year before she died, at 67. Moraes had been a famous beauty, known as 'the Queen of Soho' in the Fifties, wife of poet Dom Moraes, model to Lucian Freud, then Francis Bacon - Bacon did more than a dozen paintings of her.

But she was also an alcoholic and by the time they met on 4 February 1998 at a Tate dinner for Francis Bacon, Moraes was in a bad way. She had been told she had cirrhosis of the liver and must stop drinking or die. She did stop for a while, but then started again. After the Tate dinner, she wrote to Hambling asking for £400 'to settle some annoying bills' and suggested she could work to pay it off. In May, she started to model for Hambling every Monday and by the second session, Hambling noted in her sketchbook: 'I have become Henrietta's subject, rather than she mine.'

By November, Henrietta was 'raging and violent' and even beat Hambling up - 'which surprisingly I quite enjoyed' - but by Christmas, she was too ill to eat or drink. When Hambling went round to her bedsit on 6 January, she found the front door jammed and Henrietta shouting that she would have to climb in through the ground-floor window, which she did. She found Henrietta in bed, and insisted on phoning the doctor. 'She demanded I calm down, give her a hug and another cigarette. She died in an instant, making her doctor laugh on the telephone.'

Hambling drew her that afternoon in the hospital morgue and again a few days later in her coffin. 'Our affair had been a dance of death with drink as the third party. Her parting gift to me was a lesson in how to die.'

Was Moraes the love of her life? 'She always said she was. But I don't like the term - different people are different things. She was the most powerful muse.' But the affair with Henrietta interrupted a much longer relationship with Tory Lawrence, who was married to the amateur jockey Lord Oaksey when Hambling first met her.

'Tory Lawrence has been in my life since 1983 or something. And still is. But again it's life happening. She [Henrietta] was like a force of nature. She was like the sea, if you like. I didn't stand a chance! I mean things happen, life happens, and I think that phase of drawing Henrietta is one of the greatest series of drawings I've done yet. She had that thing of looking through you - no pretence - you couldn't have any secrets from her. I think that's why a lot of people found her so frightening.' Does she wish she'd met Henrietta earlier? 'Yes of course, of course. But again, I don't think there's any point in regretting anything. I'm pretty fatalistic. Life gives you what it gives you.'

One of the unlikelier things life gave Hambling was a Suffolk cottage left her by an admirer called Lady Gwatkin. Gwatkin had bought a painting from Hambling in 1988 and asked her to dinner and, Hambling recalls: 'There was a lot of smoked salmon and champagne. When it became time to leave, the tiny Gwatkin jumped and attempted a more than social kiss. At this point, my dog Percy suddenly turned into the Hound of the Baskervilles, leapt vertically between us, fangs at the ready, emitting a blood-curdling growl, and I backed out of the front door.' Nevertheless, Lady Gwatkin remained an admirer and left Hambling her Suffolk cottage and water meadows when she died in 1994.

Hambling retreated there after Moraes's death and conceived the idea of Scallop, a memorial to Benjamin Britten shaped like a shell, on the beach at Aldeburgh. It was eventually made, mainly at her own expense, and unveiled in 2003. To her horror, many locals objected. 'I really was amazed by the reactions of some of the people in Aldeburgh. I thought, you know, they'd been given this work of art, it hadn't cost them anything.' It was vandalised several times, but it hasn't happened lately. 'I can't tempt fate by saying they've given up, but maybe they've found other things to do.'

In 2002, while she was waiting for permission to build Scallop, she started sketching and painting the sea along that coast - a habit she continues to this day and that has resulted in the great suite of sea paintings currently on show at Abbot Hall, Kendal. She also paints waterfalls, but less successfully, I think, because she has never actually seen one. 'Maybe I should go and look at one,' she suggests. Maybe she should.

The sea paintings are obviously about sex - 'Orgasms, you know,' she told the Today programme - but are they also about her own mortality? 'Well, they're very much about life and death, I have to say. Because - it's quite corny as I identify with the land - but the sea is eating my whole bit of Suffolk coast away, so I think of it as time... I'm not putting this right. But the sea is the powerful thing: it's like a lover, it's death, it's rebirth - it's got everything going for it obviously.'

And it's winning?

'Yes, it's winning! Even though I'm not yet middle-aged! But the sea paintings are as much about life and death as any of the drawings of my father.'

The great thing about her sea paintings is their size and energy - astonishing energy considering that they were painted by a sexagenarian with, as she points out, unusually short arms. I asked if she felt that she was as energetic as she ever was, and she said rather sharply, 'What do you mean? On account of my approaching middle age, Lynn?' Er, yes.

'Well, you've got to have a bit of energy because the whole thing is about movement. Matisse painted from his wheelchair with that long brush, didn't he? So it's all possible. But at the moment, I leap up and down my ladder. Look! There's my ladder.' But this is obviously a touchy subject and she admits she is worried because there is a lot of arthritis in her family and she takes every possible pill and potion to ward it off. 'It's all so boring!' she exclaims. She hates ageing altogether. She was so depressed at turning 60 two years ago she had to buy herself a Bentley to cheer herself up. But even that has started breaking down.

Does she still drink a lot? She emits a bravura series of harrumphs and snorts before conceding: 'Well, I'm not exactly teetotal! Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't remember the last evening when I didn't have a drink.' And she is a longstanding member of the Colony Club in Soho, which is known as Cirrhosis Central. She goes there 'when I'm feeling strong - I love it. It's that Fifties thing of no inhibitions, being fantastically, lethally rude to each other, letting the whole thing out, and then meeting the next day and all being friends. I think that's terrific. People are too polite now, don't you find?'

Absolutely, but I wonder if she thinks drinking helps her creativity? 'I don't think there's any rule. Some mornings, if I have a hangover, I can produce something - or the hangover can produce something - which is quite good. And then other mornings it's just crap. But then this is where it's all so peculiar because if I think, things have gone really well today, then I look at it the next morning, it's absolute shit and I'll be in the depths of despair. I do destroy a lot of work, I do get very full of doom and gloom about the whole thing. It's a very masochistic business. But sometimes you think you've produced rubbish all day and then next morning it's quite good. There's never any rule, you never know.'

The problem with Hambling is exacerbated because her work is so variable. I think her Wilde memorial is an abomination, but there are other things, like the death drawings or the sea paintings, that are truly great. The art world seems equally baffled. She was honoured early in her career when she was made the first artist in residence at the National Gallery in 1980, and she won the Jerwood Prize in 1995, but she has never really consolidated her reputation.

It doesn't help that she is primarily a painter at a time when painting is unfashionable. 'I love painting and if it's old-fashioned, I don't care. Why do you go back to a Rembrandt self-portrait again and again and again? Why do you go back to a Constable? Why do you go back to a Titian? For me, the thing that a painting can do, that a photograph can never do, is give you a sense of the thing happening in front of you - that sort of life force that oil paint has still amazes me. Acrylic! Yech! Concrete muck! Awful. No life to it, no sex to it, frightful. The thing I love about late Titian is that I feel I'm there in the studio while he's actually making this image. And that's what I'm interested in - this mysterious thing that paint can do that nothing else can do.'

· No Straight Lines: Waves and Waterfalls is at Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, until 21 Dec, and then transfers to Marlborough Fine Art, London W1, from 9 Jan to 2 Feb

Painting by numbers

Born 23 October 1945 in Sudbury, Suffolk.

Educated At Hadleigh Hall School, then at Camberwell and the Slade School of Art, graduating in 1969.

1973 Her first exhibition of paintings, depicting solitary pub drinkers, sells out.

1980 Becomes the first artist-in-residence at the National Gallery.

1995 Wins the Jerwood Prize.

2001 Releases a book of drawings of her dying lover and muse, Henrietta Moraes.

2003 Her 4-metre steel tribute to Benjamin Britten, Scallop, strongly polarises critics and is vandalised.

They say: 'If there's one adjective to describe Maggi, it is courage. She is unflinching. She looks at people, sees their shortcomings and their pain, but she doesn't look away.' John Berger, cultural commentator.