KEITH VAUGHAN (BRITISH, 1912-1977)
Figure Study
dated 'Sep19/63' (upper right)
pastel
50.8 x 40.4 cm. (20 x 16 in.)

Provenance
With Portland Gallery, London, 6 July 2022, where purchased by the present owner

We are grateful to Gerard Hastings and Anthony Hepworth for their assistance in cataloguing this lot.

Vaughan used wax crayon as early as the 1940s but in 1959 he discovered oil pastels while he was teaching at the Iowa State University Art Department. He brought dozens of boxes of them back with him to London. Their density of colour and the immediate manner in which they could be applied instantly inspired him. Furthermore, since they don’t leave a dusty residue nor smudge like traditional artists’ chalks, they offered new and unforeseen possibilities. In a letter to his close friend the painter Prunella Clough, Vaughan expounded their virtues explaining 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).

As ever, Vaughan employs an economical and harmonious selection of four or five related hues, building up an abstract arrangement of forms encasing a series of interpenetrating figures. The chromatic arrangement of cobalts, indigos and azures are counterbalanced by more dominant blacks and earthy hues.

Vaughan exhibited fourteen such oil pastels as part of his 1962 Retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery.

We are grateful to Gerard Hastings for compiling this catalogue entry.