Keith Vaughan (1912-1977)

Over the course of the 1970s Vaughan produced some of his finest gouache paintings. In a journal entry late in 1973 he mentioned that he was, 'doing the odd gouache from time to time' (unpublished entry: 14 November 1973). He couldn't have been more understated nor more modest; he was working at a prodigious rate producing forty-two gouaches in rapid succession, each one feeding into the next. The following year the Waddington Gallery exhibited thirty-seven of them, including the present work.

Landscape with Standing Forms is at once a figurative and an abstract painting; Vaughan frequently created his finest work while hovering midway between these seemingly polarised styles. It was an intuitive and instinctive approach to painting and he discussed this very point in his journal: 'I seem to be purposefully trying to make a composition of mutual contradictions. Figures which aren't figures, landscape space which is something else, shapes which are neither abstract nor figurative what am I doing and why?...Certainly I am following a scent, but it is buried and extremely irrational'. (K. Vaughan, Journal and Drawings 1939-1965, London, 1966, p. 146)

G.H.