Like people, Maggi Hambling’s wave paintings are at once consoling or frustrating, brilliant or monotonous. Like people, they sometimes make no sense and sometimes make perfect sense; or they stop short in the middle of a gesture and drift away, leaving us alone for awhile in the exhibition to think about what just did or didn’t happen. And, just as with people, there really is no escape from them: you feel that if you were to leave the Fitzwilliam’s Mellon Gallery then you might soon enough re-encounter these deep horizons and rough tides in life.

As the artist remarked in a recent interview with the Arts Desk, "I remember very distinctly walking into the sea and talking to it as if it were my friend." Whatever this nostalgic prattle signifies, it’s true that the art here is framed in and issues from the painter’s personal life spent in Suffolk and by the North Sea. This is the latest, generous showing of Hambling’s almost biographical paintings and gives us a chance to stand back and examine what she has been up to for the last ten years.

It will probably please viewers who are satisfied by artistic extremes, but who might not have taken to Hambling because of the lack of modesty in her work with sculpture, characterized as it is by a more controversial, popular aesthetic.

Yet there is certainly a lot of controversy visible upon the large canvases that form the majority of this exhibition, but it is a mannered kind, by which sharp bursts of energy fluctuate back into listless, watery droughts of thickly mixed paint. The result is engrossing, and allows isolated strokes of colour to possess a deliciousness that they could never have had out of context. In many of these artworks a single flourish suddenly seems to irrigate a welter of dense debris and pounding surf placed at the centre of the composition.

Perhaps the best, and least conventionally modern, thing about Hambling’s work is that it is resolutely not whatever the viewer wishes to make of it, but what she wishes to make of it after the viewer has consented to play Hambling’s game. One’s emotional responses do not exhaust the paintings’ impact but leave them intact and free to develop. Most pleasantly, instead of striving to elicit its audience’s participation, The Wave actually compels it, foraging quietly upon one’s senses and preconceptions. Specifically, the 2009 painting ‘Midnight Wave’ gives the feeling of night passing and of something intense happening, though it would be difficult to say precisely what is going on out at sea. But it is less a given event which interests Hambling than its way of happening, and the artist fixates upon the same natural image – slung so neatly between form and formlessness - turning her wave through different angles, shapes, sizes and shades of colour.

Against any supposed distinction between art and nature we can posit Hambling’s synthesizing, inclusive approach which sees no reason to give up either, and makes a virtue out of their indissoluble connection. By contrast, the neat displays of monotypes and photographs from the 1998 You are the sea series are hard to fully appreciate. Appearing as muted snapshots, these older works are perhaps less compatible with any notion of artistic freedom and spontaneity which we may now associate with Hambling. The addition of these pieces does not help the viewer to reach the conclusions about pictorial space that her paintings quite pointedly engage with. Taken as a small retrospective, however, there is little to regret about an exhibition as fresh and exuberant as this one.