Figures in Yellow Sunset

One of a string of trips made abroad in the early to mid-1960s, Keith Vaughan visited Morocco in April 1965 with his friend Patrick Woodcock. Vaughan’s journals from the trip detail the usual erotically charged encounters but also include lyrical impressions of the beauty of the Moroccan landscape. Detailing his impressions of the Agadir coastal road, Vaughan writes of 'marvellous dry luminous landscape, scrubby foothills, cinnamon-pink and ochre white-earth dotted with dark olives and patches of glowing saturated colours from the peasants working in the fields' (K. Vaughan, Journal and Drawings, London, 1966, p. 212). Figures in Yellow Sunset gives form to these observations in gestural, layered applications of gouache and luminous oil pastels, a medium Vaughan discovered during his time teaching at the Iowa State University in 1959. More or less unavailable in England at the time, Vaughan pioneered their use and the present work shows the artist deploying them to their full expressive potential. Mirroring the above journal entry, the hooded figures in the foreground are integral to the landscape and its palette of colours, rather than independent from it. Rendered as a handful of rectangular forms, they blend with the colours and surfaces around them. In places they appear almost translucent, allowing the bright whites and orange tones of the landscape to shine through from beneath.

We are very grateful to Gerard Hastings for his kind assistance in preparing this catalogue entry, whose new book on Keith Vaughan’s graphic art is to be published soon by Pagham Press in Association with the Keith Vaughan Society.