Karl Maughan's gardens of delight in Dunedin

Karl Maughan, The Lost Path
Milford Galleries, Dunedin
Until March 24th

Karl Maughan's garden paintings have a remarkable universality to them. They are generally paintings of New Zealand gardens but they could be anywhere in the world as they are generally populated by rhododendrons.

They are images of gardens, pathways and enclosures in which people find emotional and aesthetic pleasure. The mixture of informal plantings and carefully tended plants is something of a metaphor for the way humans manage to adapt landscapes to their desires and needs.

As well as not really being able to locate the geographical location of the images it is also not clear what time period we are in. We could be in a garden of seventeenth century England, nineteenth century France or present day New Zealand. This uncertainty adds to the timelessness of the works.

With most of these paintings we are drawn into the work, impelled to walk towards the painting as though into an actual garden. However, as one gets closer into the vista one discovers you are actually entering a painting. What originally appeared to be hyperrealism is actually broad dashes of paint. Up close these works are like impressionist paintings, a combination of gestural marks, pointillism, and the white of the canvas which gives the work its shimmering light.

The artist captures different times of the day or at least the way that sunlight creates sections of light and dark, shimmering colour and shadowy areas. This enables him to create contrasts between the intense areas of colour and the structures of the shrubs.

There is, in most of the paintings a suggestion of narrative; hat the path leads to somewhere, that someone has been on the path or that we as viewer are about to enter into the picture and take our part.

There is also a great sense of the tactile about these works. The rhododendron flowers seem soft and fleshy but up close it is the blotches of paint which are engaging. At a distance the bulbous shapes of the bushes appear to be like Faberge eggs but up close we see they are composed of subtle changes in paint colour and texture.

In many of these works the intensity of the colour and the precision of the sculpted plants makes them seem slightly surreal as in the case of “Skye Farm” ($25,000) where the scene could be out of Alice in Wonderland.

In “Harrison’s Line” ($25,000) the artist appears to be bleaching out the colour with an overlay of light while in “Ormond Road” ($27,500) the shadows intrude.

With “Riverena” ($25,000) he presents a different view. Instead of looking at the garden from a distance we are in the bashes looking out.