The majority of Vaughan’s drawings from the 1970s are intensely private. Towards the end of his life, sick with cancer and beset with personal problems, drawing became an habitual and formalized process. Once completed, they were filed meticulously in cardboard folders and variously labelled ‘Figure Drawings’, ‘Reclining Figure’, ‘Standing Figure’ and, as with the present examples, ‘Grafitti Drawings’ – and misspelled in his characteristically dyslexic manner.
The male figure continued to absorb him as his recurring sexual desires were urgently notated. ‘Keith had an overwhelming compulsion to visualise his fantasies in a ritualised manner,’ recalled the late Professor John Ball. ‘He needed to reveal them on the page in front of him; it was part of his daily routine, a kind of formal procedure.’ Vaughan articulated himself in a very direct fashion in these late drawings. They are uninhibited and devoid of censorship since they were, for the most part, executed for cathartic purposes and investigate his erotic projections. The ‘Grafitti Drawings’ provide an insight into his psycho-sexual core, so important in feeding his wider creative abilities and are the culmination of decades of draughtsmanship; we see Vaughan chasing a fleeting thought and keeping his mental fantasies animated whilst giving them visual form. They give voice to what John Ball described as,
"Keith’s complex sexuality and his refined artistic vision. They are wonderfully evocative and masterfully concise. For me they’re some of the finest things that Keith produced – distilled rather like Beethoven’s late quartets or Eliot’s best poems – seemingly effortless yet packed with significance. There’s such an economy of means – a few lines express an entire biography or a complex persona. Keith drew to work out his passions and make his emotional requirements concrete. Most are terribly personal and so very moving in their honesty; they’re concerned with basic and often brutal human truths and examine complicated inter-relationships – what more can one ask of an artist?"