Karl Maughan’s invitational, immersive commitment to the garden as a framework for painting is enduring. His compositions, borne from close observation, are pieced together in layered constructions to create worlds of ever-green, ever-in-bloom possibility.

Having worked with the subject matter for decades, Maughan delights in the garden as a mechanism to explore formal interests in the interplay of light, colour, and shape on a painting’s surface. Artist and author Gregory O’Brien writes, “The gardens are like musical compositions – both the score and the thing played – with their upward and downward inflections, stops and starts, repetitions and transitions, their points of confluence and dispersal. Truth and accuracy are far less of a concern than phrasing, rhythm, pitch, and timbre. ‘You’re not responsible for the veracity of what you are painting,’ he [Maughan] notes. ‘The painting is its own thing.’”1

The large-scale painting, Ashhurst, is an outstanding example of Karl Maughan’s practice from his London years. The artist moved to London’s East End in the mid-1990s, sharing a studio space with a group of young British artists who would later rise to fame. This period was hugely formative for Maughan’s practice. His works were acquired by the renowned businessman and art collector, Charles Saatchi, and were included in the exhibition, Neurotic Realism, at London’s Saatchi Gallery, which looked to define a new trend in British art. Shortly afterward, Maughan’s painting, Aro Valley (1999), was purchased by the Arts Council Collection of England. Painted during the same period, Ashhurst possesses similarly meticulous attention to detail in a work of outstanding scale and quality.

1.Gregory O’Brien ‘Florescence: Notes from the studio,’ Karl Maughan, Auckland: Auckland University Press and Gow Langsford
Gallery, 2020 p.153