Keith Vaughan

The Estate of the Artist
Prunella Clough
Peter Adam
Private Collection, U.K.

London, Menier Gallery, Clough & Vaughan: Visions & Recollections, 15th April - 2nd May 2014, cat. no.107, illustrated.

The sheet is not laid down, but is adhered to a card window mount via two tabs at the upper edge. There are some tiny flecks of slight loss to the centre of the grey pigment. There is an old area of in-filling to the extreme top right corner, not visible in the present mount. There is an old tear to the centre of the upper edge, again not visible in the present mount. Elsewhere there are some minor handling marks visible to the extreme edges of the sheet, and light creasings in the top right corner, together with some scattered traces of minor surface dirt, staining and studio detritus, but this excepting the work appears in very good overall condition. Housed behind glass in a cream card mount, set within a silver gilt 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 uncharacteristically large pastel dates from the early 1960s, not long after Vaughan returned from the USA. Hitherto he had used wax crayon to work with, but its greasy translucence had its drawbacks. In 1959 he discovered oil pastels while he was teaching at the Iowa State University Art Department. Their rich density of colour and the immediate manner in which they could be applied instantly inspired him. Moreover they left no dusty residue nor did they smudge like traditional artists’ chalks. Oil pastels were virtually unknown in England at the time, and in a letter to his friend Prunella Clough Vaughan jokingly explained that they were ‘waterproof, impervious to everything, can be rolled, stamped on, eaten!’ (see M. Yorke, Keith Vaughan his Life and Work, London 1990, p. 189). He continued to use oil pastels for the next two decades.

Vaughan evolved a pictorial language that was rooted in observation but which was translated through abstract means. In the present work the bottles, which imply figure-like entities, are condensed into vertical forms, described in Vaughan’s characteristic serrated line. Similarly, the fruit-like elements are reduced to contrasting rounded shapes. The economical use of colour assists in harmonizing these disparate elements into a coherent, tight composition.

Gerard Hastings, 2016.