“Leaving the marks in”: The Dialectic of Journal & Drawings by Keith Vaughan

In 1966, at the request of publisher and friend Alan Ross, the British painter Keith Vaughan (1912–77) released Journal & Drawings—a self-edited selection of entries from his as-yet-unpublished personal journal, accompanied by an abundance of drawings and experiments in photography. This ‘conglomeration of words and images’ was intended by Vaughan to be his autobiography and a corrective to what he felt was the art world’s sanitised ‘false image’ of him. This essay interrogates the relationships between words and images in Vaughan’s text, providing analysis of their composition and close readings of specific arrangements. In the final chapter of the monograph Image of a Man (2020), I explore Vaughan’s Journal & Drawings as an ‘autobiographical artefact’ and consider Vaughan’s self-editorship as a curatorial endeavour, with some commentary on the images incorporated into the finished book. However, that chapter focused primarily on the selections and self-editing from the journal’s manuscripts and the many major alterations to the written material made by Vaughan. This essay now provides in-depth readings of the drawings and photographs themselves and their relationships to the journal entries in ways that are variously illustrative, dialectic, and hybrid. The photographs do not function as mere authentication of people and events, but instead draw attention to their artificiality, to being filtered. Vaughan did not document the grit and mundanity of mid-twentieth-century life; his photographs are not ‘of the world’, as Stanley Cavell once posited of the form, rather they testify to Vaughan as a dreamer, as a skilled fantasist who captures momentary encounters in pursuit of an ideal image. The drawings, meanwhile, are very pointedly (for a painter) sketches in pencil or ink, revealing painstaking processes and continual reiterations. Vaughan admired forebearers such as Cézanne for their ‘unfinished’ technique and formal articulations of struggle; likewise, he had loved Eliot’s poetry for leaving in its ‘scaffolding’. This essay reveals how Vaughan moved beyond purely illustrative notions of word and image, positing the dialectic between the beauty he reached for in images and the messy, self-doubting realities within the journal entries, resulting in an evocative hybrid text.