William Maughan: Spotlight Feature

William Maughan

Meyer Gallery

William Maughan

Spotlight Feature

Meyer Gallery

225 Canyon Road Santa Fe, NM 87501 505.983.1434 800.779.7387 www.meyergalleries.com

William Maughan was born in Long Beach, California in 1946. He began his career in commercial illustration in New York in 1974. Since that time his illustrations have appeared in numerous magazines, children’s books, paperback book covers, and ad campaigns. After establishing himself as a widely sought-after illustrator, William visited Sedona Arizona where he walked into the Husberg Fine Art gallery. Alan introduced William to the works of Frank McCarthy and Howard Turpning. He saw Maughan’s Illustration portfolio and immediately represented him as a painter of Western genre. Soon after came a feature article in, “ Artists of the Rockies and the Golden West”. Maughan’s early Western works hang in the Booth Museum, Georgia and the Vernon Filley Art Museum, Pratt Kansas. He is also listed in “Contemporary Western Artist”, Southwest Art, Authors, Peggy and Harold Samuels.

After a trip to France a new painter’s vision was born after seeing Monet’s later works of art during a trip to the Marmottan Museum in Paris in 1992. Spending hours analyzing the magnetic color fields of Monet’s palette, Maughan’s theory of color changed. He then developed his own color theory based on an analogous split-complementary palette, which asks for mixing secondary from tertiary hues, allowing the tertiaries to dominate the field. He also began to work in soft pastel; a medium he feels comes naturally as it allows for a spontaneous approach to his palette. This new vision and artistic interpretation of a purely painterly approach marked a turning point which continues today. Maughan created images in both oil and pastel that focused on the serene and peaceful mood of the life he experienced.

Recently Maughan has returned to his love for the West and Feitelson’s hard edge abstractionism. This coupled with his analogous split-complementary palette has created a new vision and direction that you see today.

In 2004 William authored, “The Artist Complete Guide to Drawing the Head” published by Watson-Guptill, which has been translated from English into Spanish, Turkish, French and Chinese.

In 2012 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorates Degree from the Academy of Art University, for life time achievement in the field of art.

Early Snow Fall oil 18 x 24