I am late for my interview with Deborah Azzopardi. The tube is delayed and I’m underground, so can’t let her know. She’s meeting me at a station near her home in north London, and I arrive feeling embarrassed – but am greeted by the sight of her waving cheerfully from her car. When I reach out to shake her hand, she kisses me on both cheeks. When we arrive at her house, I’m handed a tray of sandwiches – and when I leave a couple of hours later, she insists, like my own mother would, that I take a KitKat.

Meeting Azzopardi in person explains a lot about her work. Her graphic, pop-art images of glamorous men and women are directly linked to the warmth and humour of her personality. For her, painting is pure pleasure, and she’d be doing exactly the same thing and loving it, even if nobody bought her work.

But people do buy it, in large numbers. Prints of Azzopardi’s work are sold by retailers including IKEA, in over 50 countries. Her originals are sought after by a growing number of collectors, selling for tens of thousands of pounds, and a solo exhibition of her work is showing at the Cynthia Corbett Gallery on Cork Street, London, from 31 March to 5 April

 

She lives in a sprawling, open-plan house that conceals a garden, with a Union Jack flying from a flagpole – she put it up for a World Cup party a few years ago and never took it down. From the back door there’s a winding path strewn with dusty fairy lights, that leads to a small, mostly glass building housing her studio.

‘When I work, I’m in my own world,’ she says – and her workspace does feel like a haven, hidden away among the trees. She started her career at the same time as she started a family, so the two have always run along hand in hand. ‘You paint, you run back to the kitchen, you put on the chicken, you paint, you run back, you put on the roast potatoes. That’s how it is. When children are little it’s harder, because there are school runs, homework and laundry, but any job has that. At least I was on the spot.’

She is, she tells me, ‘completely uneducated’. She was married and working in retail as a young woman when she contracted meningitis. ‘The doctors asked me if I’d like a rabbi or a priest, so I thought I was going to die. I was amazed when I woke up alive the next day – I’m still stunned about it! I thought “I’ve got to change my life. I must paint.” I wanted to die knowing I’d done my best.’

That was 28 years ago. She threw herself into work, taking her paintings to every art fair she could find. ‘I remember the first piece I sold – but at the time I didn’t want to tell anybody, in case they said “Yeah? And when are you selling the next thing? How will you pay for the gas until then?” I kept quiet about it, and just carried on.’

There is a sense that Azzopardi doesn’t know where her success has come from, and she won’t really take the credit for it. She tells me again and again how lucky and privileged she feels to be working. ‘The secret is not to stop,’ she confides. ‘Enthusiasm can take you a long way in life. And there are so many things to paint, I only hope I live long enough to paint everything.’