Karl Maughan
July 28th 2008 09:05
I was in the Milford Gallery the other day and found that they had a screenprint by Karl Maughan (whose name, I just realise, I’ve been spelling for some years as Maugham – which might explain why anybody else looking for his name on Google and using that misspelling finds a post on my other blog!).
I like Maughan’s work, but not so much in screenprint format. He invariably paints wonderful bustling garden scenes full of rhododendrons in full bloom. The abundance of bushes fill up the paintings until they look as though they’re going to move out of the frame. (You can see a number of his paintings on the Milford Gallery site.)
In the screenprint version, however, the colours are muted instead of full, and it’s a bit like going into the rhododendron dell in Dunedin’s Botanical Gardens and finding it’s too cloudy a day to appreciate the colours.
Even the reproductions on the Gallery’s site, wonderful as they are, don’t give quite the quality of the originals. I guess that’s only to be expected.
The Net is superb for being able to find paintings that you’ve perhaps seen only once or twice in reality, and catching up with them again. A few years ago, most artists weren’t nearly as visible on the Web. Nowadays you can sit at home and catch up with an enormous number of them. Even though reproductions are never quite the same as the real thing (any more than they are in books) it’s still wonderful to be able to view them at all.
It would be interesting to take a short and relevant segue into talking about acne cream at this point, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to meld Maughan and acne together without insulting him in some way, and that’s not something I’d like to do. (Some other artists I’m less circumspect about ‘insulting’!) So we’ll forget the acne cream tangent and finish just by saying: Do go and look at the Maughan on the Milford Gallery site. I’d be interested to hear what you think.
I like Maughan’s work, but not so much in screenprint format. He invariably paints wonderful bustling garden scenes full of rhododendrons in full bloom. The abundance of bushes fill up the paintings until they look as though they’re going to move out of the frame. (You can see a number of his paintings on the Milford Gallery site.)
In the screenprint version, however, the colours are muted instead of full, and it’s a bit like going into the rhododendron dell in Dunedin’s Botanical Gardens and finding it’s too cloudy a day to appreciate the colours.
Even the reproductions on the Gallery’s site, wonderful as they are, don’t give quite the quality of the originals. I guess that’s only to be expected.
The Net is superb for being able to find paintings that you’ve perhaps seen only once or twice in reality, and catching up with them again. A few years ago, most artists weren’t nearly as visible on the Web. Nowadays you can sit at home and catch up with an enormous number of them. Even though reproductions are never quite the same as the real thing (any more than they are in books) it’s still wonderful to be able to view them at all.
It would be interesting to take a short and relevant segue into talking about acne cream at this point, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to meld Maughan and acne together without insulting him in some way, and that’s not something I’d like to do. (Some other artists I’m less circumspect about ‘insulting’!) So we’ll forget the acne cream tangent and finish just by saying: Do go and look at the Maughan on the Milford Gallery site. I’d be interested to hear what you think.
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