Procession of Figures, Umber and Blue

This watercolour explores one of Vaughan’s key artistic preoccupations of the 1960s, figures in groups or more formalised processions. Whether assemblies of bodies interlaced like the classical Laocoön (the Trojan priest attacked with his two sons by giant snakes) or seated musicians, it was a theme that recurred fruitfully and which he explored from every angle. He wrote: ‘I would like to be able to paint a crowd — that abstract entity referred to by sociologists as the masses’. And, in Some notes on painting, August 1964: ‘The problem — my problem — is to find an image which renders the tactile physical presence of a human being without resorting to the classical techniques of anatomical paraphrase. To create a figure without any special identity (either of number or gender) which is unmistakably human: imaginative without being imaginary. Since it is impossible to conceive a human form apart from its environment, an image must be found which contains the simultaneous presence and interpenetration of each. Hence the closer and closer interlocking bombardment of all the parts, like electrons in an accelerator, until the chance collision, felt rather than seen, when a new image is born.’

A.L.