Keith Vaughan

The Estate of the Artist
Belgrave Gallery, London
Waddington Galleries, London
Messum's, London, where acquired by the present owner, 25th January 1991

Brighton, Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, Keith Vaughan, A Volatile Medium, 10th June - 9th November 2014, un-numbered exhibition.

The sheet is fully laid down onto a supporting board. There are areas of craquelure and paint loss scattered throughout the composition. These are predominantly in the black pigments including by not limited to the dark areas of the left figure's torso and head, in the right figure's arm and in the dark areas to the left of the figures and above the figures. There are some very minor traces of surface dirt. With the exception of the above the work appears to be in good condition. The work is book mounted and presented in a gilt frame. Please contact the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present lot.
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Vaughan was, perhaps, the leading exponent of gouache painting in British art during the post-war years. This highly animated example comes from one of the richest periods of his work in terms of his gouache production. It was made at time of professional uncertainty and emotional turmoil, since he had come to believe that everything he had worked towards throughout his career, was now considered irrelevant with the onset of Pop Art and New Generation trends.

When he produced this painting much of Vaughan’s time was spent at his cottage in the heart of the Essex countryside. The style, treatment and characterisation of the figures are related to other images he made of bathers and divers set against the backdrop of his garden pond. Friends and colleagues came to visit, including Derek Jarman, David Hockney and Patrick Procktor, and they all sunbathed and swam in the pond. Vaughan made drawings and took photographs and these assisted him in the production of his gouache paintings that he later worked on in his little studio.

A distinguishing quality of Vaughan’s gouache technique is the variety and diversity of his of mark-making and how he retained a record of each stage of the working process in the final statement. For example, in some areas the whiteness of the blank paper sparkles through; in other places translucent washes are retained, counterbalanced elsewhere by opaque brushwork that obliterates previous pictorial decisions. Vaughan’s free handling of paint, his distinctive frothy deposits and energetic brush marks, lend the image an uncommon vitality and liveliness. This painterly, vigorous application transmits a considerable expressive force.

As ever, Vaughan has imposed a sense of pictorial architecture through the use of structured slabs of colour, blocks of pigment and the limbs of the figures reaching out to the edges of the paper as if to stabilize themselves. Moreover, he has selected his colour with typical care. The characteristic range of blue hues is combined with creams and burnt orange and these are bound together with broad brush tracks made with Indian ink.

In his journal Vaughan often wrote about his work, the struggles he had to overcome and the compulsive nature of his gouache painting: The routine continues. I start the day with gouache. I have no particular idea in mind, but there is nothing else to do. After breakfast I get out the pots and jars and rags and paper. It is quite systematised now. I have been doing it since last November. Like everything else – compulsive. And it all adds up to agonised futility. Yet in effect it is no more futile than other people’s routine. But mine is solitary. It involves no one else. I have done more gouaches than ever can be shown or sold. Yet I continue to do them because there is nothing else to do. (Keith Vaughan, unpublished journal entry, July 26, 1965).

We are grateful to Gerard Hastings, author of Drawing to a Close: The Final Journals of Keith Vaughan (Pagham Press) and Keith Vaughan the Photographs (Pagham Press), for his assistance in compiling the catalogue note for the present work.