Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas: “We live on doubt”

Real friends in the art world, or any world, can be a rare find. Yet, sitting across from me, on a grand circular table in an upstairs room of Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert gallery, is living proof.

Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas met on 23rd October 2000. They know this, not because there was much clarity of mind in Soho’s Colony Room club that night, but because it was also their shared birthday. 25 years of friendship later, they’re staging a joint show, ‘OOO LA LA’, across two spaces on Bury Street, presented by Sadie Coles and Frankie Rossi Art. It reveals their distinctions, unexpected overlaps, and a number of portraits created of each other, some freshly made, some long-simmered.

Over whisky for Maggi, white wine for Sarah, and a rare glass of on-the-clock champagne for me, we get down to it. The vibe is seance meets nostalgia; the conversation ricochets through death, old friends, ghosts, doubt, bitching, social media impersonators and muses. Pour your own stiff one for this…

Harriet Lloyd-Smith: You’ve been specific about where you met, although I think it was a night of, um, merriment, so I don’t know how much you actually recall… Oh Maggi, your whisky has arrived. Let’s go back to the Colony Room in 2000. You were introduced by Soho dandy Sebastian Horsley. 

Maggi Hambling: He was a great friend of ours. What I remember is we had a great big hug, and that was it. 

Sarah Lucas: From that moment, we were friends. 

MH: I’d always liked Sarah best of the YBAs. 

HL-S: What were first impressions? 

MH: I just thought, I’m meeting a blessed person who was born on the same day as me. 

SL: I don’t remember what I thought 25 years ago!

MH: Then Sarah moved to Suffolk.

SL: So we’d run into each other.

HL-S: You’ve exhibited together a bit before this show. Recently in ‘Big Women’ at First Site in Colchester

SL: That’s been fun. It does something when you work with somebody else in mind, it has some indefinable effect on your thinking.

MH: But [with this show], it’s quite amazing, the way the colour works, because it might look to someone as though we were both working in the same studio, but it was absolutely not the case.

HL-S: Did you talk much during the process? Was there any snooping at each other’s work? 

SL: Not much! We met up to do certain things, like having our portrait taken by my partner [Julian Simmons]. We also got both our feet cast, which didn’t make it into the show. They’re perfectly decent sculptures in their own right, but we had too much in the end. So we spent time together, sort of chucking ideas in and just speculating about things we might do, and getting in the spirit of the thing. 

HL-S: So it was a slow burn? 

MH: Well, the idea was given to us by [our dealers] Sadie and Frankie, but neither of us took much notice then.

SL: But then the moment came to really start cooking things up. 

HL-S: You’ve done some new portraits of each other for the show. Maggi, let’s talk about your portrait of Sarah. When Louisa Buck recently asked you about it, you were on the second version and replied, “Don’t ask any more fucking questions!”. I presume things improved…

MH: The one in the show was the third go. The first two got terribly overworked. Painting comes alive and dies a lot of times. And if it finally kicks the bucket, you’ve got to get rid of it. Being with Sarah casting the feet was the first time I’d seen her at work, we’d always just met for supper or something – how she moves about in this huge concentration – and that’s what made the last portrait, which I’m quite pleased with, because it just painted itself like the best paintings do. 

HL-S: Sarah, you don’t often let people in your studio. 

SL: Well, there isn’t much to see. I’m not touchy about people seeing what I’m doing. It’s not like I try to keep anything private, it’s just that you tend to work on your own to focus. 

HL-S: And your portrait of Maggi in cigarettes. Was that the only attempt? 

SL: No, actually! There were some other fragments I tried out, with different pictures of Maggi. There’s one I’m still finishing and I’ll carry on with them. There’s something quite compelling about Maggi! Ha ha. 

HL-S: The cigarette is a motif you have in common. 

SL: Well, it’s one of the few things I’ve actually done portraits in. I did one of Franz West. But yes, it’s something between us. 

HL-S. Another thing you share is ‘controversy’. Maggi, you’ve said that you “never set out to be controversial”, but some of your public commissions have, um, provoked discourse. 

MH: “Ha! That’s putting it lightly…

HL-S: I’m trying to be diplomatic. Sarah, you’ve sort of made controversy a medium. I think mostly of your works using pages from British tabloids. 

SL: Yes, they were controversial to me. Then [as soon as] you put something in a gallery, people cry controversy at the drop of a hat. 

HL-S: Do you care less about what people think and say about your work now? 

SL: A lot of the time, it’s the people that make the controversy. But something has to arrest people’s attention. It can’t be so bland that nobody stops and looks at it.

HL-S: Maggi, where are you with controversy now? 

MH: As Oscar Wilde said, “When the critics are divided, the artist is at one with himself”. It has honestly always surprised me. I was surprised by the fuss about Scallop on Aldeburgh Beach because I thought it was one of the more beautiful things I’d made. There was half a page in The Telegraph saying “Take it away, nobody wants it!”

SL: The Telegraph’s got a lot to answer for. 

MH: Now if you go on the Telegraph travel section, it says “Where to go in England”, and it’s got a fucking great picture of Scallop!

HL-S: At least they came around. 

MH: The Mary Wollstonecraft [controversy] I didn’t understand at all, but there were two great comments: one was from my friend, Paul Bailey who died last year. He rang and said, “Well, you have put the pussy among the pigeons this time.” Then I was leaving Waitrose in Saxmundham and a cheery Suffolk woman gave me a big grin and said, “Been making trouble again I see!”

SL: It’s like being in Brideshead Revisited in here – you’ve got that look about you. 

HL-S: Me? Oh no… I need to spice things up. 

SL: It doesn’t lack spice, it just feels like a period drama, with the room and everything. 

HL-S: It’d be nice to time travel back. I’m sick of social media. Do you both do social media? 

SL: I can’t say I never appear on it, but I don’t do it myself. 

MH: Somebody in Suffolk pretended they were me!

HL-S: Wait, what? 

MH: Yes, there was something about Leiston library closing. Someone called me and said “Where were you at the protest march?” I didn’t even know about it. This person who pretended to be me had said I would be at the protest. 

HL-S: So you were used as a fake celebrity guest to get people there? Terrifying. 

SL: All the social media stuff is terrifying. 

MH: When everyone started getting computers about 30-40 years ago, I refused to have one. I thought someone would tap in ‘Rembrandt’ and up would come a crappy little reproduction. 

SL: I resent things being on screens. It’s not that you can’t do anything creative with it, but you’ve got to do it in this format. It’s quite nice when something finds its own format and shape. 

HL-S: I’m glad I didn’t grow up on it. 

SL: It does seem like we grew up in the time of Dickens or something.

HL-S: I imagine rural Suffolk hasn’t changed much since Dickens’ time.

MH: Apart from fucking Sizewell C [nuclear power station] being built!

SL: It’s changing rapidly.

HL-S: Quite second-homey?

MH: A lot of artists have moved into Suffolk and Norfolk.

HL-S: Is that a good thing?

MH: No. There’s a very good cartoon in a Suffolk magazine which had two rats, each standing on the side of a road looking at an art gallery. One says to the other, “That’s the trouble with Suffolk, you’re always within four feet of an artist”. And it’s true! They’re coming like lemmings, and I don’t mean Sarah, but all the others.

HL-S: Maybe Bruton’s full. Sarah, you were born and bred in London, and it’s where it all happened for you art-wise. But you live in Suffolk now, about half an hour from Maggi. What does the countryside offer you that the city can’t? 

SL: When I first went, there was no plan. I wasn’t supposed to be moving to Suffolk, it was supposed to be just on weekends, but I just got drawn in by all the people I met. And the incredible freedom in people. There’s a brilliant pub called the Lowhouse Laxfield – people would go to the pub in tractors, with their oxen. It was like a medieval marketplace. I also needed to slow down on the London thing, it had become so crazy. 

HLS: Maggi, you grew up around all that Sarah’s describing. 

MH: Well I grew up in Hadleigh which is west Suffolk, so the more domestic side, but now we’re on the East side, what used to be the wilder side. 

SL: It’s less populated than it even was 600 years ago. They’ve got the sea, and lots of desolate bits of coastline – it’s brutally and deeply rural. It’s not far from London, but it feels it. 

MH: There’s the whole sense of a day in Suffolk: the dawn, the early morning, late morning, lunchtime, early afternoon, late afternoon, a whisky, and then the night. Whereas in London it’s all sort of the same. 

SL: You don’t notice the day or the season in the same way. 

MH: And you don’t see any stars in London. 

SL: You feel like you’ve got more time [in the countryside]. 

HL-S: Maggi, you’ve always said you wake up every morning and do a drawing with your left hand, and that’s never changed. You both work instinctively, letting your subjects take you. Are there moments where that doesn’t happen? 

MH: You can have a whisky at 6 o’clock in the studio and you think you’ve had a very good day. You look at [the work] the next morning and it’s a load of shit. Then you can think “Oh Christ, I need a whisky, I’ve had the worst possible day in the studio”. The next morning, it’s not bad! There’s never any fucking rule to it! Like doing those three portraits of Sarah, it was pretty good hell doing the first two – doubt and all that – but I couldn’t have done the last one unless I’d done the first two. 

HL-S: Do you still have doubt? 

SL: Oh God, yeah!

MH: We live on doubt. 

HL-S: You’re a fan of improv, Sarah. Franz West, who you were friends with, was the king of improv. 

SL: Something I do which helps is think, “What do people want to see from me at this moment?” Not that I really go out of my way to fulfill what other people want, but just to try and understand where we are now. I often ask friends about that, and see if I can glean some useful pointers. 

HL-S: Funnily enough, we had Sadie Coles on the podcast recently and you came up. She described you as “clear minded and self-directed” and “good at ring fencing your intellectual time.”

SL: Ha ha! Well when the chips are down, I am quite good at realising – perhaps not as early as might be desirable, but before it’s too late – that now I’ve really got to take the bull by the horns! I get moments of clarity that way. Because I’m not much for planning, or committing to exactly what I’m going to do. 

HL-S: So what about you Maggi, are you good at ring fencing your intellectual time? 

MH: I don’t even understand what that means. 

HL-S: Do you ever feel external pressure to get things done? 

MH: Life dictates what I make, like when somebody dies. George Melley – who I painted for a couple of years after he died – said I’d go down in art history as Maggi ‘Coffin’ Hambling. Another friend, Amanda Barrie (Carry on Cleo) said she was going to write in her will that if she died before me, and as she’s 90, I wasn’t going to be allowed within 20 miles with my sketchbook. Rude, I thought. 

SL: Making this show in particular, I really wish we’d had more time. I was finding it very compelling and really enjoying myself, but I wasn’t getting resolution with anything. I got really worried about time. I thought that if it was Francis Bacon, he would just say, “I’m not doing the show. I’m not ready.” I would never do that, particularly if I’m doing it with somebody else, but maybe he’s right. 

HL-S: It’s interesting, sometimes risky, to go from friends to ‘colleagues’.

SL: It makes a difference. Not to friendship, but there’s another level of depth. 

MH: I think trust comes into it. I trust Sarah as a friend, and as an artist. It may sound a bit soppy but it’s true. 

HL-S: When did you actually decide how it would work together? 

SL: Very late in the day! I had great trouble with the cigarette portrait, but more so the sculpture of Maggi, which had many incarnations. It’s not strictly speaking a portrait of Maggi, which is why it’s called Maggiesque. But it was right up until the installation, then *click* it just went together, sweet as a nut. 

HL-S: I’d like to ask about muses. It’s a funny word that you hear mostly in fashion these days. 

SL: I actually think about ‘musing’ as an activity, like mulling something over…

[Lights in room dim inexplicably]

SL: Oh! The seance has started!

HL-S: Are the spirits with us? 

MH: A!! E!! I!!

HL-S: I think something just passed through me? The ghosts of muses past. 

Sarah, you’ve used the term to refer to your ‘bunnies’ before, and Maggi you’ve referred to certain people as muses. For each of you, what’s the distinction between a muse and a deep friendship? 

SL: I think deep friendship is often a muse. You have a deep curiosity about somebody and find yourself thinking about them often, or wondering what they’d think, or trying to get your head around the way they think.

MH: The muse is my subject, whatever it is. In other words, the subject is in charge of me. I think something can only move someone else insofar as the artist has been moved in the first place. 

SL: Something has to happen. 

MH: And this thing of everything being an experiment which I’ve always believed. 

SL: “Taking a hike with a fixed destination is not taking a hike!” That’s what Franz West used to say. 

MH: And Bertolt Brecht said, “Without chaos, nothing is moving.”

HL-S: Ok, final few questions…

MH: Final few!?

SL: Ha ha!

HL-S: Ok, final question. It’s about the art world. Sometimes, regrettably, it can feel superficial… 

MH: What?

HL-S: Superficial. 

SL: I see what people mean by that, sometimes. It depends where you’re hanging out I guess. But perhaps it applies more to fashion… 

MH: But I think that’s a fairly recent thing. When you think about the Colony Room, and everyone just being honest with each other – bitching like hell, yet remain best friends. I think that’s gone a bit. 

HL-S: Yes. Well what I meant was sometimes it’s hard to identify real friendships. 

SL: There is a lot of networking…

HL-S: Maggi, you’ve said before that “the work should be your best friend.” 

MH: That’s what Lett (of Lett and Cedric) instilled upon me if I were to be an artist. So whatever I was feeling – tired, bored, sad, happy, randy – I could go and have a conversation with it. 

HL-S: You see a lot of artists placed together ‘in conversation’ for exhibitions – the classic is a long dead artist with a contemporary one. But this show has come from both of you and your friendship. Between artists, how do you identify a real friendship? 

SL: I don’t know! The thing about real friendship is it develops. I’m amazed by how long ago I met some people. 

MH: [Phone plays God Save the King ringtone]. Hello, I’m doing an interview, I’ll ring you later. 

SL: I’ve had good fortune in my life with friendships. I wouldn’t describe any of the relationships I’ve had as superficial, even the more up-and-down ones. 

HL-S: Your work is very different. 

MH: Yes…

SL: It is, but not as different as we thought it might be. But imagine meeting yourself? Who wants that? 

HL-S: What if you met yourselves at the Colony Room in 2000? 

SL: That would be too much. Fortunately that can’t happen. 

HL-S: It might, if we stay at this table long enough.