TIM MAGUIRE

Still life and flower paintings have a long and prestigious tradition in Western art, although it is not always realised that some of our greatest artists have worked in this genre. While some of the creators of masterpieces in fresco and mosaic from Classical and early Christian times remain anonymous, who can forget the lilies of Simone Martini, the brilliance of the still life in Hugo van der Goes' great triptych in the Uffizi, the numerous studies and paintings of Leonardo da Vinci, through the great Dutch masters, Chardin and Goya to the Impressionists, Vincent van Gogh and beyond?

While the flower paintings of Tim Maguire are part of this history, they are, like those of his predecessors, great works of art whatever their subject. Maguire's flowers are the occasion for his creative achievements, spectacular in their handling of form and colour on a scale totally unrelated to nature.  This contemporary interest in the large scaled work combines with the use of technology in achieving his unique images. Working from nature, his sketches come from digital photography and the computer, transferred to canvas in transparent veils of colour, worked over in solvent to create new highlights, and finished with the dry brush. Such modern technical invention recalls the equally bold experiments of the Italian Renaissance artists, of oil paint fingered and brushed to meet the demand for a new vision of reality. The surreal and super-real in Maguire's art comes from a combination of technical brilliance and magnification whereby the original image of the flower is metamorphosed into something quite different - of proportions related to the imagination more than the world of nature. Yet, who is not captivated by these rivals of nature, nor seduced by the beauty of their forms, decked in the most enticing colours and immaculate surfaces?