Linda Tyler on Karl Maughan

Karl Maughan

Featured in Minimal Opulence: The Gary Langsford and Vicki Vuleta Collection

Karl Maughan’s ten years in London spanned the end of the twentieth and beginnings of the twenty-first century during the heyday of the Young British Artists (YBA). Having secured representation by Gow Langsford in 1987 when he had just graduated with his BFA from Elam, Maughan was only 30 when he arrived in England seven years later. He was quickly absorbed into the YBA scene. His successes in Britain include being one of just 48 painters chosen to be finalists out of the 1,788 British-based artists who entered the John Moores Biennial Painting Prize at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool in 1997, and having a painting purchased by advertising mogul Charles Saatchi for his private collection. While he lived in the United Kingdom, his nearly two metre square painting Aro Valley was bought by the Arts Council England in 1999 for its permanent collection. As if to mark the dawn of the new millennium in 2000, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa responded to these English accolades by purchasing a major work of Maughan’s, the six panels of his beautifully detailed depiction of a herbaceous border, the ten-metre-long A Clear Day.

It is always a clear day in Maughan’s paintings, and flowers bask in the eternal sunshine of a spotless garden here in this vision of a brilliant day in early summer in the Welsh Marches. Like his other large works from this era, this painting impresses with its physicality. The subject is the azaleas and rhododendrons framing a path at Hergest Croft in Hertfordshire, at Kington, near the border with Wales. Open to the public only during spring and summer, from 1 April to 31 October annually, these gardens are home to the finest collection of trees and shrubs in the British Isles, with over 5000 specimens of maples, birches and zelkoves, including the oldest example in Britain of a tree introduced from China. Divided into parks, groves and glades which expand over 28 hectares, Hergest Croft has been created and maintained over 120 years by five generations of the wealthy Banks family. As it happens, the second of June 2002 (when Maughan visited and took the photographs that would form the basis for this work) was the Sunday of the long weekend occasioned by the Bank Holiday to celebrate the monarch’s birthday on the Monday. Unlike the heatwaves in June and July which Britain has experienced in recent years, in 2002 the temperature at Kington reached no more than a comfortable 22 degrees.

In Maughan’s painting, we are first drawn to how the apricot and orange blooms on the right arc away like the trajectory of a holiday weekend in summer, diminishing into the distance where they perfectly complement the greens of the orderly foliage above. While this part of Hergest Croft Gardens is famously dominated by a massive avenue of blue cedars planted in 1900, Maughan has edited out some of the trees to let us see the politely whitish-blue summer sky beyond. He has also cranked up the lumens so that the sunshine falling on petals and leaves is bright and antipodean rather than reservedly English. On the left though, the mood is quite different, with the darker colours and occluded light creating a counterpoint. It seems the sun has already passed its meridian and long shadows are cast across the grass path by the hairy blue cedar which towers above the mauve rhododendron. This introduces a psychological chill, as if some unseen threat or danger might lurk. Each brush stroke is visible and expressive, and they mass together to build the work’s emotional impact on its viewer, leaving us wondering about what lies unseen, just around the corner ahead.

Linda Tyler