Drawing to a Close: the Final Journals of Keith Vaughan

Keith Vaughan, Edited By Gerard Hastings:

ISBN 10: 095717960X / ISBN 13: 9780957179608

Published by Pagham Press, 2012., 2012

About this Item

Book is in very good condition 300pp with colour and b/w illustrations.

Seller Inventory # 037319

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Drawing to a Close: the Final Journals of Keith Vaughan
• Publisher: Pagham Press, 2012.
• Publication Date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 095717960X
• ISBN 13: 9780957179608
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

Observations of a considerable painter dying of cancer, over 2 years, revealing, melancholy, cool and, to me, cruelly nostalgic. BRIAN SEWELL, ART BOOKS OF THE YEAR, EVE STANDARD, NOV 29, 2012 Drawing to a Close provided the year’s most compelling but harrowing read. Vaughan was a fine painter and moreover and more rarely, one who wrote very well. These journals have never been published in their entirety but now we can register the full extent of Vaughan’s eloquent ‘taedium vitae’ as he contemplates and then commits suicide. He was writing his journal until the very moment he lost consciousness and the pen fell from this hand. Hastings’s superb editing and shrewd commentary flesh out Vaughan’s life and his circle with knowing detail. Vaughan’s sobering musings on life, love, sex, art, ill heath and death reveal, with intimate unflinching candour, the inner most thoughts of this tormented, complicated, deeply intelligent man. William Boyd, TLS, Nov 30, 2012 Drawing to a Close, not bowdlerised, brings [Vaughan's Journals] to a frank conclusion in a beautifully produced and compelling final volume. Their benign editor is also co-author of a wide-ranging survey of Vaughan’s work (Keith Vaughan, Lund Humphries). Brian Sewell, Eve Standard, Dec 20, 2012 Now for the first time a new edition of Journals is presented unabridged in all its suicide bleakness. Hastings just missed meeting Vaughan...willingly undergoing total immersion in the subject’s tortured unconscious…the culmination of all these labours is Drawing to a Close. Ruth Guilding, TLS, Mar 8, 2013 Extensively annotated, beautifully illustrated, Drawing to a Close, contains the last 2 years’ entries, almost entirely unpublished - the darkness of Vaughan’s world finds only occasional textual relief, but its counterpoint lies in the drawings of adolescent youths, sometimes graphic but more significantly vital, instinctive and comradely. Richard Canning, Literary Review, Mar 2013