.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Vaughan produced an outstanding series of gouaches over the course of the 1970s despite his declining health. Unable to maintain creative activity for extensive periods, and since large-scale oil painting was fatiguing, he turned to the more controllable medium of gouache. The 1973/74 gouaches are examples of bravura painting and dazzling alla prima technique. Nevertheless he was profoundly sceptical of his own working methods. 'Impossible to sustain concentrated work for more than two hours in the morning due to bad procedure and working methods. I rely entirely on a blind creative drive to set me going and keep me going. Naturally that decreases with age' (Keith Vaughan, Journal, Friday 13 April, 1973).
'He was wielding paint with new authority borne out of years of experience, while he wrestled with the relative merits of figuration and abstraction, a problem that had unsettled him for twenty years. He produced a total of forty-two outstanding gouaches over the course of the year and thirty-seven were exhibited at the Waddington Gallery in April/May 1974. Vaughan demonstrated a new economy of means in representing the idyllic, rustic life going on around his country cottage where he had spent much of his time recuperating from ill health. Figures are scaled down to simple silhouettes and constructed with the minimal use of inky outline. Without resorting to the deceptions of linear or aerial perspective, Vaughan achieves the impact of pictorial depth while managing to retain the integrity of the picture plane. By tilting, flattening and layering coloured planes he conveys a sense of air and space and distance between forms. Foreground farms are arranged into abstract patches and open green fields ... In the middle distance the black-wood barns of rural Essex are condensed into his essential geometrical wedges' (P. Vann and G. Hastings, Keith Vaughan, Farnham, 2012, p. 174).
G.H.
'He was wielding paint with new authority borne out of years of experience, while he wrestled with the relative merits of figuration and abstraction, a problem that had unsettled him for twenty years. He produced a total of forty-two outstanding gouaches over the course of the year and thirty-seven were exhibited at the Waddington Gallery in April/May 1974. Vaughan demonstrated a new economy of means in representing the idyllic, rustic life going on around his country cottage where he had spent much of his time recuperating from ill health. Figures are scaled down to simple silhouettes and constructed with the minimal use of inky outline. Without resorting to the deceptions of linear or aerial perspective, Vaughan achieves the impact of pictorial depth while managing to retain the integrity of the picture plane. By tilting, flattening and layering coloured planes he conveys a sense of air and space and distance between forms. Foreground farms are arranged into abstract patches and open green fields ... In the middle distance the black-wood barns of rural Essex are condensed into his essential geometrical wedges' (P. Vann and G. Hastings, Keith Vaughan, Farnham, 2012, p. 174).
G.H.