Smash hit

The one picture in the exhibition that combines both sea and portraiture features the face of Hambling’s late lover Henrietta Moraes, who died in 1999, rising up from a wave, a luxuriant eyebrow at its crest. “I think of her often and I believe, however mad it sounds, that she is in the Moon.” Does she miss her?

“Of course. But if you love people they go on, don’t they?” Does she have a partner now? “One has one’s moments,” she says, and starts prowling the studio smiling, but won’t name names. Love is important to her. “There’s a Chinese saying: ‘To make a work of art you need three things: the eye, the hand and the heart’.” But she says: “However much you love or are close to someone, you are alone. The fact of being an artist is for me a very solitary business.”

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In each painting — most notably in Henrietta’s eye — there are streaks of the same rich blue; Yves Klein blue, or to give its proper name French ultramarine. “To me it’s infinity,” Hambling says simply. One of two self-portraits on show features Hambling smoking, a cigarette packet warning “Smokers die younger” falling away from the fag in her mouth. Half the portrait is streaked with that zinging blue, the other half is almost obliterated, melted away, wreathed in smoke. She painted it three months before kicking the habit. “The cigarette is the passage through to death,” she says.

Why on earth continue to pose with a fag? “Protection,” Hambling says quickly. Against what, or who? “People can eat you up,” she says, getting up for another prowl. “I like to be in charge of who eats me up.”

“Everyone has an image. People say I’m over the top, but I have never understood which top it is I’m supposed to be over. Keep ’em guessing, keep ’em guessing.” Turning 60 was “absolutely traumatic. I didn’t have a party, I didn’t want any presents. I bought myself a 1979 silver Bentley and feel a lot better now.”

She hates being caught not performing, but has a less theatrical side. Far from her flamboyant image, she spends “hours and hours” alone in her studio. “Most of the time you doubt the work, go into states of despair, think you’ll never paint another painting, wonder whether you’re really an artist,” she says quietly. “It’s really terrible. I don’t think it ever stops. After all that, it’s nice to go out and kick your legs in the air, though I can’t drink and dance and get up at 5am as I did once upon a time.”

Of the future, she barks: “I am not a soothsayer. What happens to me in life dictates what I paint. You have to go through things to make art. Not being able to predict that is part of the excitement. ”

Hambling has always painted her heroes, whether they be tramps, scientists, writers, or her neighbour Giovanna mourning her husband. The one remaining subject she would love to paint is Nelson Mandela.

For her the “physicality” of her craft is key. She tries to “get my own crap out of the way” when painting, aiming to distil “the abandonment of formality” in her sitters. Another self-portrait features Hambling’s bum (with thong), a barn owl, exotic-looking frog, a bullfinch and a face from a Mexican tomb. “They were in my mind at the same moment. Life is a series of moments, some of great intensity and others not.”

She is obsessed by the duality of life and death and has “a conversation” with her own mortality every day. Yet she professes to be terrified of dying. “I’m not ready for it.” Another great roar. “People try to be in charge of their lives, but it’s when other things are in charge of you that things get interesting.” And she looks down.

What has been in charge of her? “Painting, Henrietta, the sea,” she says, absently. “My God, the power of the sea, eating away at the land . . . We’re just funny little things toddling about, aren’t we?” And off she prowls again, to keep ’em guessing.