Keith Vaughan

Sale, Phillips London, 4 December 2001, lot 125, where acquired by the father of the present owner

In 1959, Vaughan discovered oil pastels while he was teaching at the Iowa State University Art Department. Their density of colour and the immediate manner in which they could be applied instantly inspired him. Furthermore, oil pastels don’t leave a dusty residue nor smudge like traditional artists’ chalks, they him offered new and unforeseen pictorial possibilities. In a letter to his close friend the painter Prunella Clough, Vaughan expounded their virtues explaining that they were ‘waterproof, impervious to everything, can be rolled, stamped on, eaten!’ (see Malcolm Yorke, Keith Vaughan his Life and Work, London 1990, p. 189).

Gerard Hastings