Ken in The Times, 3 Mar 2009
The on-line version has a different title from the printed title above “George Always: Maggi makes Melly with her old friend”. Ken looks at George Always, an exhibition by Maggi Hambling, at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool 31 May 2009 The exhibition is of portraits of jazz musician George Melly. Ken writes
“…George Melly's mix of energy, camp and rhythm was totally original, funny and very sexy. And here he is as a revolving pot-bellied bundle of dazzling rainbow blue with a black eye patch in a painting by Maggi Hambling.… She paints the action of a wave breaking and the suppleness of her good friend Melly dancing, singing or laughing. “Paint can live, move and breathe in front of us,” she says. “This wave breaks for him.”
"Melly kept performing until a week before his death in 2007. Six weeks before he died, his dementia by now advanced, he came to lunch with Hambling. “Dementia suits me,” he confided, “I'm a surrealist.” A short time later he died of cancer.… The Melly paintings are vibrating, speaking to me. Here he's lecturing at a garden party, an interdimensional portal extending from his shoulder. “That's an angel's wing,” Hambling says. “What's this in his eyeball?” I ask. “His long-time love, Squeaky,” she replies. Here he is with a fish in air. “George loved fishing. Fish are always showing up in surrealistic paintings.”
Talking of the artist Maggi Hambling Ken says
“I browse through her London home, where a massive elephant chair, cowskin rugs, flying Indonesian sky dancers, Mexican masks, a mechanical ostrich, a glamorous long-lashed bust of her by the sculptor Andrew Logan, stuffed parrots, her own glorious portraits and a jungle garden straight out of Rousseau provide an ambience not unlike a gorgeous Art Deco salon. “George was very pleased to see I'd finally got a grand piano,” she laughs, pointing to a working toy replica. Up the stairs under her portrait of Derek Jarman on the stairwell ceiling is her haven, although she spends most of each week at her house on the sea in Suffolk. Fedora at the ready for outside wear, she's wry, sharp as a tack, self-possessed and immeasurably loyal. “I cultivate a tough persona, because I'm very choosy about who I let eat me up.” She displays that loyalty by keeping alive in her paintings those dearest to her - Melly, Jarman and her one-time muse, the decadent beauty Henrietta Moraes, the failed cat burglar. “