.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
This highly animated painting dates from the mid 1960s, one of Vaughan's richest periods in terms of his gouaches. It was a time of emotional uncertainty and turmoil for the artist, who had come to believe that everything he had worked towards for twenty-five years, was now becoming irrelevant with the onset of Pop Art and New Generation trends. This perhaps is reflected in the painterly, vigorous application that transmits a considerable expressive force. The small figure may well be related to Vaughan's other images of bathers and divers. Perhaps something of Vaughan's own growing isolation may be sensed in the cruciform pose of the figure, overwhelmed and submerged in the landscape of tumultuous pigment that surrounds him.
A distinguishing quality of Vaughan's gouache paintings is how they retain a record of each stage of their making in the final statement. For example, in some areas of the present work 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 the paint, his frothy deposits and energetic brush marks, lend the image an uncommon vitality and liveliness. The artist, as ever, imposes a sense of pictorial architecture on these dynamic qualities in the form of structured slabs and blocks of pigment.
Vaughan's colours are employed with strict economy since he uses only blue and ochre and then combines these with white and black. By doing so he achieves a wide variety of related hues and a colour scheme that is harmoniously determined.
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 Yet I continue to do them because there is nothing else to do' (Keith Vaughan, unpublished journal entry: 26th July 1965).
G.H.
A distinguishing quality of Vaughan's gouache paintings is how they retain a record of each stage of their making in the final statement. For example, in some areas of the present work 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 the paint, his frothy deposits and energetic brush marks, lend the image an uncommon vitality and liveliness. The artist, as ever, imposes a sense of pictorial architecture on these dynamic qualities in the form of structured slabs and blocks of pigment.
Vaughan's colours are employed with strict economy since he uses only blue and ochre and then combines these with white and black. By doing so he achieves a wide variety of related hues and a colour scheme that is harmoniously determined.
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: 26th July 1965).
G.H.