Interview: Karl Maughan & Toni Mackinnon

ArticleArt

12 Nov

Toni MacKinnon, Director of The Suter Art Gallery Te Aratoi o Whakatū, speaks to artist Karl Maughan about his influences, his evolving approach to garden painting, and the interplay between constructed landscapes and artistic imagination.

Toni MacKinnon: Recently you’ve talked about how, as the basis for your paintings, you ‘jigsaw’ photographs together — adhering less rigidly to what is in the photograph. In some ways that method of constructing mirrors the way gardens are built. What do you see as the connection between creating gardens in paint and in the real?

Karl Maughan: The way I construct my images or photographs of gardens does feel very similar to garden design. When I change things around so much these days — a bit of a garden from France combined with a bit of a garden from Italy, thrown in with something from Christchurch — it really does feel like the ultimate gardening, because I can take out 150-foot trees in a second and also add them, maybe not in a second but certainly in a lot shorter time than watching them grow. I strictly adhered to the photograph so much in the old days, but now not so much.

TM: Richard Wolfe once wrote that you tend to “overlook the down-side of the natural cycle: rot, wilt and insect strike are banished in the cultivation of the idea.” This is not true of your earlier work, but is consistent in your later work. What led that development, do you think?

KM: Richard Wolfe’s observation kind of refers to the previous question. When people used to ask me to look at their gardens and paint them, I would find myself down by the compost heap and they wouldn’t be happy at all. I have been going back to more detailed painting of late, and that does sometimes include the illnesses of the garden.

Karl Maughan, A Clear Day, 2025, At Suter Gallery Nelson in partnership Webb’s

TM: Many of your works are notably large, painted on an immersive scale; though some are, of course, much smaller. How do you decide on the size of a painting?

KM: I really like doing the larger works, and it seems to me that sometimes I also enjoy the smaller ones. It’s really good to vary them, but the large size is so much fun, too, so often I just jump into something huge for a change of pace.

TM: Your paintings have had a similar theme, yet have changed so much over the years. At the opening of A Clear Day at The Suter Art Gallery Te Aratoi o Whakatū you said that, looking back at earlier work, you could see what you were hung up on at the time. What are you hung up on in your studio right now?

KM: Looking at my old paintings at the Suter, I was painting a lot of grey and blue leaves in the early years; these days I’m enjoying water in paintings – lakes, rivers and the sea.

TM: What happens when you think, ‘I’ve done this before’? How do you push into something new within a familiar subject?

KM: Even though my paintings can seem quite similar, I go out of my way to make a certain challenge in each one, and make each one different as well.

Lot 53. Richmond Road, 2017, oil on canvas, 1420 x 2140mm. EST. $80,000—100,000 Webbs — Lot 53. *Richmond Road,* 2017, oil on canvas, 1420 x 2140mm. EST. $80,000—100,000

TM: A garden is nature that’s been ordered, framed and tended, not wild, but not entirely artificial either. It sits in that in-between space where we bring nature under control but still admire and nurture it. In your earlier work, the gardens felt like lived, local spaces; these days they feel more like idealised constructions. It seems your garden paintings consistently move further away from naturalism towards the artificial. What has driven that evolution?

KM: I don’t think my paintings have moved too far away from reality these days — I seem to be using photographs without too much adulteration at the moment.

TM: You once quoted Van Gogh saying that it can feel as though there’s a pane of glass between you and the subject, and that you just have to get closer. In your painting Richmond Road, the garden is pushed right up to the picture plane, while in others, such as Fendalton Garden, we’re led into the work by paths and implied spaces beyond bushes and hedges. Can you tell us about the use of space in your paintings?

KM: In my smaller work in the past, and recently, too, I have been using them more as the idea of details, focusing into the garden. In the big works I step back a bit more. I like the sense with the small works of almost like a still life – certainly these two works, Utuwai and Richmond, are like this pulling in and paying close attention to a snapshot of the garden.