Keith Vaughan (1912-1977)

There is an oil of this work from 1955 of the same title in the collection of the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne.

This powerful, abstracted figure of a woodman in a clearing is a typical Vaughan gouache study of a figure in the landscape, taking both man and setting merely as starting points in the process of making a memorable image. The whole composition is dominated by black ink lines and areas of light and dark. What might be a tree and a fence (or perhaps some other structure of lopped and hewn wood; even a crucifix) are interpreted as areas of intermittent darkness forming a potent fretwork in the bottom left hand corner, reaching towards and balancing the cloud of dark foliage at top centre and right. But what these patterns may represent is actually of less importance than the succession of shapes disposed across the paper which somehow seem to suggest a map of the woodman’s inner life. The painting is as much about emotion as it is about observation — perhaps the artist’s more than the woodman’s.

A.L.