"Finistere" by PHILIP VAUGHAN

$5,000.00

acrylic on paper charts

36" x 48"

PHILIP VAUGHAN

ARTIST BIO

Philip was brought up in France the son of English parents and went to boarding school in England at the age of 9. There he met Gordon Taylor, an extraordinary art teacher and modernist, his first mentor at Brighton College who started him on a lifelong love of architecture and painting and sculpture. Philip studied architecture at Cambridge and then transferred to art school graduating from Chelsea School of Art.

While doing graduate research at Northumberland Polytechnic art school, Philip Vaughan completed his first large public kinetic sculpture, the 48ft tall Neon Tower erected on the roof of the Hayward Gallery in 1972 on London’s South Bank Art Centre.

He worked for some years teaching at the City of London University while he experimented with inflatables and kinetics. While he was there he built a 42ft ocean-going sailing boat in Rotherhithe, in east London. In 1979 he sailed that boat across the Atlantic with his wife Alice. Shortly after landing in Florida he started working for Walt Disney Imagineering designing animatronic dinosaurs, rides and sets for theme parks.

Philip lives in Altadena, Los Angeles, working on sculpture, drawings, paintings and public art commissions. He continues to plan and build public sculptures, using light and other media. Most recently Philip has been working on large steel sculptures at the Buffalo Creek Art Center in northern Nevada and as artist in residence at Vita Art Center in Ventura.

Artist Statement

This work comes out of a lifelong love of the ocean. I have sailed on a variety of sailing ships and yachts in many seas, from the Caribbean to the North Sea to the Mediterranean and now the Pacific Ocean. I sailed to the US from England in a boat that I built in London’s dockland in Rotherhithe. I still have that sailboat, it’s based in Channel Islands harbor, a little way up the coast in Oxnard.

Recently, I have been working on paintings based on marine paper charts glued to canvases and then painted over with acrylic washes such that the markings of the charts are still clearly visible. I have a large collection of these paper charts as my sailing days go back well before digital charts, to days of sextants, sight reduction tables and marine logs – instruments that were used for hundreds of years. These marine charts show water depths that were measured by hand over the centuries, the location of buoys and lights, significant landmarks, everything that a sailor needs to know to navigate safely over the ocean, that covers after all 70% of the surface of our planet.

acrylic on paper charts

36" x 48"

PHILIP VAUGHAN

ARTIST BIO

Philip was brought up in France the son of English parents and went to boarding school in England at the age of 9. There he met Gordon Taylor, an extraordinary art teacher and modernist, his first mentor at Brighton College who started him on a lifelong love of architecture and painting and sculpture. Philip studied architecture at Cambridge and then transferred to art school graduating from Chelsea School of Art.

While doing graduate research at Northumberland Polytechnic art school, Philip Vaughan completed his first large public kinetic sculpture, the 48ft tall Neon Tower erected on the roof of the Hayward Gallery in 1972 on London’s South Bank Art Centre.

He worked for some years teaching at the City of London University while he experimented with inflatables and kinetics. While he was there he built a 42ft ocean-going sailing boat in Rotherhithe, in east London. In 1979 he sailed that boat across the Atlantic with his wife Alice. Shortly after landing in Florida he started working for Walt Disney Imagineering designing animatronic dinosaurs, rides and sets for theme parks.

Philip lives in Altadena, Los Angeles, working on sculpture, drawings, paintings and public art commissions. He continues to plan and build public sculptures, using light and other media. Most recently Philip has been working on large steel sculptures at the Buffalo Creek Art Center in northern Nevada and as artist in residence at Vita Art Center in Ventura.

Artist Statement

This work comes out of a lifelong love of the ocean. I have sailed on a variety of sailing ships and yachts in many seas, from the Caribbean to the North Sea to the Mediterranean and now the Pacific Ocean. I sailed to the US from England in a boat that I built in London’s dockland in Rotherhithe. I still have that sailboat, it’s based in Channel Islands harbor, a little way up the coast in Oxnard.

Recently, I have been working on paintings based on marine paper charts glued to canvases and then painted over with acrylic washes such that the markings of the charts are still clearly visible. I have a large collection of these paper charts as my sailing days go back well before digital charts, to days of sextants, sight reduction tables and marine logs – instruments that were used for hundreds of years. These marine charts show water depths that were measured by hand over the centuries, the location of buoys and lights, significant landmarks, everything that a sailor needs to know to navigate safely over the ocean, that covers after all 70% of the surface of our planet.