Strangely Addictive
edited by Hannah Valentine & Gabriella Stead Auckland University Press, Auckland 2020 MICHAEL DUNN As one of our best-known and commercially successful painters whose garden images have iconic status, Karl Maughan was an obvious choice for a lavish coffee-table book.
Karl Maughan, produced by Gow Langsford Gallery in collaboration with Auckland University Press, is a seductive and colourful publication which showcases his art to great effect. There are over 150 paintings reproduced here in large colour plates, many taking a full page so that they do justice to the works.
Some show astonishing details of his paint application where the strokes and slashes of thick impasto have an almost abstract effect of light, colour and pattern. They demonstrate that Maughan is a painter first and foremost not an illustrator or botanical artist preoccupied with accurate detail of flowers and shrubs; although types of flowers such as dahlias, irises and nasturtiums can be readily identified.
The design and layout of the book are hard to fault as page after page of colour plates allow the works to be enjoyed without distraction. It is a visual feast and a celebration of paintings that are wonderfully free of narrative or verbal referencing, unless we count allusions to specific gardens such as Kew or Titoki in the titles.
As Dick Frizzell says in his preface, Maughan’s solution to the problems of being a modern painter are ’incredibly
