When I paint a portrait, I try to empty myself, so the truth of the person, their spirit, can come through me on to the canvas. It’s the same with the sea – the waves come through me and their force happens on the canvas.  I have always been drawn to the sea – her power, her mystery and her intimate beauty.  Irony can be overdone in art. Great art always comes from the heart.  The main thing art school taught me was how to roll cigarettes. I was proud of the fact I could roll a cigarette at a red traffic light before it changed to green. I gave up smoking for five years when I was 59 because that’s what my father did. And then I took it up again – it’s far better the second time around.  A friend is someone you can laugh with. There are people who don’t laugh. I tend to avoid them. I cannot contemplate life without laughter.  Oscar Wilde said: “When the critics are divided the artist is in accord with himself.” Some of my sculptures seem to annoy people, but if a piece of work is described as controversial it’s proof it has some life to it.  Those who object to Scallop [her sculpture on Aldeburgh beach] might be cross if it were taken away. People have got married at the Scallop, there’s been a funeral at the Scallop and lovers continue to make use of its lower regions.  I never ever go on holiday. I’d go pottier than ever if I didn’t work every day.  A painting can live and die many times before it’s finished, so when you’re working, you’re on a knife edge. You can be happy one moment and full of doubt and depression the next.  I feel younger now than when I was 20. You’re full of worries when you’re young. As you approach middle age you realise worrying is a bit of a waste of time.  I can’t imagine life without sex, but it can be time consuming. And time is all we have, isn’t it?  I’m lucky I never became a mother. If I’d ever been in love with a man it would have been a natural course of events to want his child. But I know myself well enough as an animal to say that if a baby was crying in one room and a painting crying in another I would probably be urged to go to the baby.  In my latest show there are eight big Walls of Water [sea paintings] and a smaller canvas which is a wall of water for Amy Winehouse. I was always very moved by her voice and when she died I tried to paint the colour of her sound and the colour of her spirit.  George Melly said I’d go down in art history as Maggie “Coffin” Hambling for painting people when they die. It’s quite strange trying to make a portrait with as much life as you can in it of someone who is dead, but then people do go on being alive inside you.  If someone was to paint me after I go I wish it could be Rembrandt. Ronnie Rembrandt, as I call him, he fully understood the wisdom of the last line in Some Like it Hot: “Well, nobody’s perfect.”  Maggi Hambling: Walls of Water is at the National Gallery, London, until 15 February 2015
The artist, 69, on a lifelong love of the sea, not having children and why she wished Rembrandt had painted her portrait