Keith Vaughan

(British, 1912-1977)

Landscape with Church 49.9 x 39.7 cm. (19 5/8 x 15 5/8 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
With Austin Desmond Fine Art, London, where acquired by
Professor J.N. Ball
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, Austin Desmond Fine Art, Keith Vaughan 1912-1977, December 1989, cat.no.102

In 1964 Vaughan bought a row of derelict, workmen's cottages on a quiet lane near Toppesfield in the heart of the Essex countryside. Once renovated, he installed a studio at Harrow Hill cottage and worked there on small works on paper during the summer months and at weekends. The surrounding landscape and local villages provided him with ample visual material, and he embarked on a series of gouaches that incorporate both landscape and architectural motifs. In the present work the spire of an unidentified church is clearly visible at the upper right, while the alternating white and coloured geometric forms evoke the presence of windows and walls of rural buildings among trees and shrubbery.

Vaughan's picture-making process initially involved steeping himself in nature, familiarising himself with it to the point that its memory and quality entered his system enough to eventually coalesce into a painting. He would go for lengthy walks, noting along the way various aspects of the terrain. He drove around the local villages and narrow country roads in his car, pulling over to make preparatory drawings. These aide-mémoires assisted in the transformation and refining process of the landscape but, nevertheless, imagination, memory and recollection remained as important as observation and recording:

Imagination is based always on observation; it is a summary of the evidence of the senses, intensified in the memory and carried forward one stage into the future where it stands as a revelation of the truth not yet achieved by the slower process of nature...the point of value lies in whether our own experience is enlarged by the distortion.
(Keith Vaughan, A View of English Painting, 'Penguin New Writing', vol. 31, 1947).

We are grateful to Gerard Hastings for compiling this catalogue entry. His new book Keith Vaughan: The Graphic Art, is to be published by Pagham Press.