Footnotes

Provenance
With Marlborough Fine Art, London, where purchased by Miss Maclennan
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, Marlborough New London Gallery, Keith Vaughan: New Paintings, December 1968, cat.no.28

Green Landscape is typical of Vaughan's semi-abstracted approach to landscape subjects during the 1960s. A range of harmonious colours – sap and olive greens, umbers and ochres – are arranged in slanting blocks of pigment. We can make out barns, agricultural buildings, tree boughs and foliage, a foreground field, a pathway and, perhaps, a discarded farm implement at the lower right. He wished to avoid the slavish reproduction of observed details in nature by making aesthetic selections and paraphrases. He believed that a painter should have the:

...imaginative power to see in the particular an implication of the universal, to observe minute particulars and remain conscious of the encompassing bigness of nature...catch the effect, the illusive poetic moment without losing sight of the more permanent enduring frame of nature...Those sinuous and pulsing rhythms derive from a memory stored with and steeped in the rhythms of nature; rhythms not of any specific forms, not delineating individual differences in things, but affirming the basic unity of all life...the bend of tree, and the sweep of a line of hills; rhythms that flow like rivers through all created and creative things. (Keith Vaughan, A View of English Painting, 'Penguin New Writing', Vol.31, 1947).

Vaughan's visual distillations purposefully reduce landscape to something concentrated and visually persuasive. His picture-making process entailed immersing himself in nature and familiarizing himself with it to the point that its memory entered his nervous system sufficiently to coalesce into a painting. He took lengthy walks and recorded features of the terrain along the way with his camera and in his sketchbooks. He also drove around, pulling over in his car to make preparatory drawings and studies. These aide-mémoires assisted in his process of refining and transforming the landscape. Memory and recollection were interconnected with optical scrutiny:

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 and to Anthony Hepworth for his assistance in cataloguing this lot. Gerard Hasting's new book on Keith Vaughan's graphic art will be published at the end of the year by Pagham Press in association with the Keith Vaughan Society.