Group of Arabs - Settat I

Vaughan visited North Africa with his friend and doctor, Patrick Woodcock at Easter in 1965. On his return he began one of his most protracted 'gouache marathons', as he called them. By June he had completed over sixty gouaches, having painted furiously each day and often into the late evenings. The resulting body of paintings included images of Arabs, as in the present example, gathering in market squares or by the edge of the sea and Vaughan described them with evocative colour schemes. He considered this to be his golden period in representing the figure simultaneously in figurative and abstract terms. He wrote that he aimed to 'render the human presence as something very real and very abstract, creating an image without identity of gender or number, which is unmistakably human - the human figure as an abstract element, like a musical chord' (Keith Vaughan, Notes of Art, from an unpublished manuscript of 1968).

In October 1965 The Marlborough New London Gallery put on a major exhibition of sixty-nine of Vaughan's new gouaches, including thirty of the Moroccan paintings. It was certainly Vaughan's best gouache work to date both in terms of his technical assurance, poetic vision and fluid application of the pigment. Inexplicably the show failed to sell, which seems extraordinary today and it shocked Vaughan. Nevertheless he continued to find consolation in his gouache painting.

Group of Arabs - Settat I is an example of Vaughan employing his water-based paint with spontaneity and freedom. Frothy, mottled textures are played off against more opaque applications and the image is handled with uncommon freshness. The figures are distilled and simplified into interplay of silhouettes whereby dark tonalities are played off against lighter ones and vice versa.

G.H.