John Madden - Coast - Opening

John Madden’s paintings speak for themselves. His landscapes are imbued with a lifelong reverence for the land which is apparent in every piece.

"I should paint my own places best", the English landscape painter John Constable expressed in a letter to a friend in 1821. Madden paints his place. He is resident of Karekare in the dramatic west coast Waitakere Ranges which are forged by extremes. Stark severe terrain is often matched by turbulent sea and sky.

The Ranges are a place of pristine native bush, thriving native wildlife and rugged black sand surf beaches. He insists on returning to such areas as Anawhata and Pararaha with a fixation on recording, in his raw, honest paintings, the ever changing landscape which he says speaks to him, and that "there are so many angles and ways to show it, it doesn't look like the same place."

Recently, Madden has spent extended periods of time in the Coromandel area from which he has been able to translate his abiding emotional involvement with the raw drama of hills, their relationship to the sea and their history.

For the adventurous, his works present as a dramatic landscape without contrivance. "Coast" is Madden’s very personal and painterly response to a landscape he never tires of painting.