Keith Vaughan

The Estate of the Artist
Prunella Clough
Professor John Ball
Private Collection, U.K.

Unexamined out of frame. The sheet appears adhered to a backing card in at least all four corners, but does not appear fully laid down. The sheet is a leaf taken from the Artist's sketch book and there is a perforated left hand edge. There is a small crease and bend to the tip of the top right corner, a tiny tear to the centre of the upper edge, and a further slight crease to the top left corner. There is staining visible along the upper edge of the sheet, together with some further light traces of surface dirt and studio detritus elsewhere to the sheet, but this excepting the work appears in good overall condition. Housed behind glass in a simple light wooden frame, float-mounted against a cream card backing. Unexamined out of frame. Please contact the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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We are grateful to Gerard Hastings, whose new book, Paradise Found and Lost: Keith Vaughan in Essex, has just been published by Pagham Press, for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.

This work comes from a series of late, intense drawings that Vaughan made which he called ‘Grafitti Drawings’ [sic]. It is a vigorous, highly worked image composed of a series of powerful lines and energetic cross-hatchings. The anatomy of the figures is handled in an immediate and summary manner. Such drawings give voice to what John Ball described as:

…Keith’s complex sexuality and his refined artistic vision. They are wonderfully evocative and masterfully concise. For me they’re some of the finest things that Keith produced –distilled rather like Beethoven’s late quartets or Eliot’s best poems - seemingly effortless yet packed with significance. There’s such an economy of means – a few lines express an entire biography or a complex persona. Keith drew to work out his passions and make his emotional requirements concrete. Most are terribly personal and so very moving in their honesty; they’re concerned with basic and often brutal human truths and examine complicated inter-relationships – what more can one ask of an artist?’ (Gerard Hastings, Keith Vaughan Four Decades of Drawing, exh. cat., London: Gallery 27).

The intense charge and neurotic quality of this work could, perhaps, be explained by Vaughan’s physical and emotional condition at that time. Two days after he executed this drawing, his journals reveal he discovered a growth which was subsequently diagnosed as cancer.

Gerard Hastings, 2016.