Karl Maughan 'Landscape with Pool'

My main objective is to astound people. I like them to look at something and it takes their breath away.

Karl Maughan

Karl Maughan’s lofty and aspirational quote is brought to vivid aesthetic realisation in this magnificent 1998 painting, Landscape with Pool. Vast and cinematic in scale, Landscape with Pool was painted in the year Charles Saatchi exhibited the artist’s works alongside prominent YBA (Young British Artists) artists at Saatchi Gallery in London, where the painter was then living.

Maughan’s decades-long painterly investigation into the charged outdoor space in which nature is framed by human intervention, began almost by chance, a world away from the heady coolness of London’s East End, in rural Manawatu. The artist’s mother Lesley, was a highly accomplished gardener and landscape designer and it is in the impressive country garden she created in rural Manawatu for her burgeoning family in the mid-1980s, in which his ongoing painterly exploration has its genesis. In endeavouring to capture his mother’s garden in celluloid Maughan set the wheels in motion for a vast and constantly evolving body of work which arguably finds its zenith in paintings such as Landscape with Pool.

Maughan’s commitment to painting gardens is now over four decades old and shows little sign of running its course. Photographs continue to remain rich source material yet the painting’s ‘juice’ comes from the liminal space between documentary and creativity, real and imagined, everywhere and nowhere. Maughan’s paintings are art about art, sharing with their subject the desire to create a space of respite and reflection from the frenetic, everyday world. Carefully crafted and composed, Landscape with Pool presents an Edenic world in which the garden is weed and pest free, beautiful – perhaps too beautiful. Maughan transports us beyond reality allowing us to focus on the composition, brushstrokes and the interplay of light, colour and shape.

Just as the garden is in itself a marker of time, so too has Maughan’s ongoing painterly essay become one. Providing the artist with a visual template, these manufactured outdoor spaces, have brought Maughan closer to his craft. Like the gardener, Maughan himself has tended lovingly to his canvases, endlessly considering and mining depth, pattern and texture, in a manner analogous to the patience of the gardener tending to the soil – mulching, weeding, pruning and planting. As we await the cyclical blossoming of one season and another, we continue to revel in the vast visual spaces Maughan creates for reflection, meditation, joy and escape. Long may Karl Maughan’s paintings bloom.