.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Keith Vaughan, usually celebrated for his male nude paintings, seriously began to explore still life as an independent subject around 1950. That year, for example, he exhibited thirty of his new gouaches at the Redfern Gallery. Nine of them were still life paintings of jugs, cups and coffee pots accompanied by various fruits carefully placed on tablecloths and balconies.
Vaughan’s approach to pictorial composition and the placement of objects in his still life subjects, is as thoughtful as in his figure paintings. In the present work he has achieved a formalised balance between the represented objects and the intervals established around them. Each is abstracted and simplified, reduced and distilled to a series of essential, jagged profiles that carefully counterbalance one another. Vaughan’s palette lightened as the wartime gloom and Neo-Romantic darkness was replaced by brighter, sunlit images. These summer fruits, described in a high-key, economical palette, are perhaps emblematic of the new, optimistic brightness that was beginning to filter into British life in the years following the war.
The pigment is applied generously and in places with surprising freedom. This reveals Vaughan’s growing awareness of the painted surface, as he started to explore the possibilities of gouache and broaden its means of application. Tension developed between the importance of the subject matter and the value of the paint as an expressive medium in its own right. This went on to become one of Vaughan’s central preoccupations as a painter.
We are very grateful to Gerard Hastings for preparing this catalogue entry, whose new book Awkward Artefacts: The ‘Erotic Fantasies’ of Keith Vaughan is published by Pagham Press in association with the Keith Vaughan Society.
Vaughan’s approach to pictorial composition and the placement of objects in his still life subjects, is as thoughtful as in his figure paintings. In the present work he has achieved a formalised balance between the represented objects and the intervals established around them. Each is abstracted and simplified, reduced and distilled to a series of essential, jagged profiles that carefully counterbalance one another. Vaughan’s palette lightened as the wartime gloom and Neo-Romantic darkness was replaced by brighter, sunlit images. These summer fruits, described in a high-key, economical palette, are perhaps emblematic of the new, optimistic brightness that was beginning to filter into British life in the years following the war.
The pigment is applied generously and in places with surprising freedom. This reveals Vaughan’s growing awareness of the painted surface, as he started to explore the possibilities of gouache and broaden its means of application. Tension developed between the importance of the subject matter and the value of the paint as an expressive medium in its own right. This went on to become one of Vaughan’s central preoccupations as a painter.
We are very grateful to Gerard Hastings for preparing this catalogue entry, whose new book Awkward Artefacts: The ‘Erotic Fantasies’ of Keith Vaughan is published by Pagham Press in association with the Keith Vaughan Society.