Capturing Eden before the Fall

New Zealand artist Karl Maughan, fresh from selling works to the Saatchi collection in London, comes home for another exhibition. MICHELE HEWITSON reports.

The little blonde girl in the red-and-white striped dress runs through the gallery shrieking with joy. She clutches a tiny flax kete.

A small boy holding a bright orange balloon is chasing her.

Bob, bob, bob goes the balloon. It weaves in and out of the crowd, popping up here and there against the lush foliage, mimicking the big bold heads of the orange dahlias and clashing extravagantly with the pink blooms of Karl Maughan's magical paintings of gardens.

The paintings are hot, almost tangibly so. Under the gallery lights, the purple and vibrant reds of the rhododendrons burn and bewitch.

The artist is hot. He is mostly known for three things: These gardens, which he has been painting for 15 years. For having sold works to the feted Saatchi collection in London. And for being married to the writer Emily Perkins.

The artist arrives late to this opening of his new show, Garden Centre, at the Gow Langsford Gallery. The keen cook has been up the hill at a mate's place doing the prep for the aftermatch function: A pig on a spit.

Fifteen years ago, when he was still a student at Elam, Maughan came to this gallery for an opening.

He got drunk on vodka and oyster shooters; his friend had a fight with the co-owner, Gary Langsford's brother. They got chucked out. That sounds promising.

The day after the opening, Maughan turns up at the gallery, a bit hung over - although there are no stories of bad behaviour from last night's opening - to get his photo taken.

I have an idea that we'd like to get a picture which makes it look as though he's walking through his gardens. This would involve taking the work down from the walls.

He gets slightly tetchy. "It's art," he says. "You can't turn it into MTV. It's just painting."

This sounds promising. "Oh good," I think. "He's going to be brattish and difficult; an enfant terrible."

It has to be said that he doesn't look much like one. He's long and lean, and at 37, dressed in a bright red T-shirt and grey shorts like the ones the boys were forced to wear at my school.

He's got an open friendly face which he's struggling to settle into a serious artist look for the photo.

He's not, sadly, going to behave badly. He might relate the vodka story with relish but "we were all a bit younger in those days."

If he ever was an enfant terrible, having infants of your own can turn you into a grown-up. Five-month-old baby Cass (named after the Rita Angus work of that name) is asleep on the floor in the gallery's office.

Veronica is the 2 1/2-year-old blonde girl from last night. Perkins pops into the gallery to pull faces at Maughan as he's having his picture taken.

They are back in New Zealand from their East London base to spend three months with family, and for the exhibition. It's all very domestic and laidback.

In a glossy magazine article about the Maughan-Perkins domicile, Gordon Collier, whose famous Titoki Point garden has made repeat appearances in Maughan's work, writes that the painter "has none of the affectations one might expect of a successful artist."

We wander up the hill to Albert Park, where the beds of fire-engine red canna lilies are auditioning for an appearance in a Maughan painting.

On the walk up he's been fretting about the fact that he's fretting about exchange rates and mortgage rates.

The couple have just bought their first house: a former council flat. They met in 1987 and left for London together, as friends, in 1994.

"Getting together took quite a while, so that was quite sweet."

He paints, she writes. They share childcare duties. It is a mutually supportive creative relationship, although success brings its own difficulties.

Maughan once read Perkins' work and would say things like "that character doesn't sound very convincing."

"Now I think 'what do I know? God."'

He lies stretched out on the grass. He appears so utterly at ease, so utterly without affectations that I eventually quote the Collier comment back at him and ask whether it's not about time he worked on developing some.

"What, affectations?" he laughs.

Why not? Cate Blanchett's just bought a painting. So has the British Arts Council. His inclusion in the Saatchi collection marks him a serious player in the post-modern art scene.

"It depends what you want to get out of your life.

"Some people need to feel very serious about their work otherwise they feel people will take it lightly."

Getting pretentious about art, Maughan reckons, "doesn't make it any more important."

Which is not to say that he's not serious about his art.

And nothing can irritate him more seriously than people who say: "Oh, Karl's been painting gardens for 15 years now. Don't you get sick of painting flowers?"

It's like saying to someone "don't you get sick of speaking English?" he says. "There's a panoply of ways."

Just as there are myriad ways of looking at the works of which Maughan thinks a lot of people would say: "It's just paintings of gardens."

In Maughan's gardens there are no spent blooms, no snail bites in the hostas, none of the black spot that plagues the gardener. They are the Eden before the Fall.

Yet, for all that perfection, walk into one of the works - and that is what it feels like you're doing when you get right up close to the brush strokes - and there is a feeling of unease.

You're alone in a vast garden and you can't quite see what might be lurking in the shadows.

M AUGHAN'S largest work in this show, eight huge panels measuring 1830 by 1520mm, is The Stranger. It is after Camus' L'Etranger, a work about complete alienation.

Maughan was tempted to give it the French title but, typically drew back: "It's a bit sort of pretentious, I suppose."

He thinks the sense of slight dislocation in the works, that slightly sinister sensation, comes from "that noon time, half shadow."

He's also pitched the horizon high: it gives you a sense of floating above the paintings. It's a trick of painterly perspective which can trick casual viewers into thinking that they're looking at photographs of gardens. It forces you to look harder.

Of his upbringing, he says: "I don't want to be too rosy-spectacled about looking back on the past, but there's something about the way people were living.

"Money and possessions seem [now] to be the crucial aim of people."

Somebody's going to have to break it to him, then, that of the seven works in the exhibition, five have sold, one is on hold and The Stranger, all $120,000 of it, has attracted serious interest.

The gallery won't say whether it is or isn't the Auckland Art Gallery.

It's worth hoping for: a magical public garden in paint.