The Local - Mt VictoriaLOCAL PERSONALITY
Artist Karl Maughan is best known for his rich and vibrant ‘garden scapes’, which grace the walls of collectors both here in NZ and overseas. Sharon Greally tracked him down.
Karl Maughan talks to me from his Mt Victoria based atelier – which is, according to him, a building which once housed an old printing press, and was the secret HQ of the SIS. The building also houses other artists, film people, and film props – including the 80’s petrol bowser used in the 2018 New Zealand docudrama ‘Mistress Mercy’ about the death of cricket umpire Peter Plumley-Walker after an unfortunate misadventure with a young dominatrix in 1989.
And I thought I was a hoarder! The things people keep lying around!
Maughan was born in Wellington. His first home was in Majoribanks Street for 7 years, before the family moved to a small farm in Manawatu.
It was at the end of secondary school that Karl discovered a love of gardens, and started painting them. After completing his Master of Fine arts at Elam in 1987, he was invited to have his first solo exhibition at Brooker Galleries in Wellington. Then it was time for the ubiquitous OE, and in 1994 Karl headed for London, where he shared studios with other artists mainly around the East End. Some of them went on to become big names in the Young British Artists movement.
He returned to Auckland in 2005, but in 2013 his wife, notable writer Emily Perkins, was appointed to a prestigious job at Victoria University at the International Institute of Modern Letters, and so they made the move with their 3 children, and now live in Kelburn. He says they love living in Wellington, and would never move back up. “We would miss our friends too much.”
He commutes daily, either walking, cycling or scootering, making a pit stop at Prefab or L’affare en route for breakfast, and meeting up with other early birders.
Maughan’s works are truly striking. I was lucky enough to spend a good amount of time just watching him paint, and the colours are so vibrant they sing. He uses a specific oil paint from the UK, which has a very high pigment percentage.
One thing not a lot of people know about Maughan is his and his fathers’ 50 year collection of Edwardian books which is housed in a secret room of his studio. I had to close my eyes so as not to see how he opened it. A secret SIS interrogation room perhaps? They started collecting these young adult fiction hard cover books, mainly for their lush picture plates and gold lettering, the ‘pizzazz of colours’ as Karl puts it. Almost an exhibition in themselves, he’s now wondering what to do with his enormous collection amassed over the years.
But my time is up, and it’s time for Maughan to get back to his botanical beauties where, (as he himself says), humans undergo “a conquest over nature and protection from the forest and the wild.”
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