There's something timeless about the human fascination with a great hairdo. Think of Marie Antoinette's mounds of Rococo curls or the 1980s man mullet, Farrah Fawcett's wispy blowout or the tight ringlets on a marble statue of a woman from ancient Roman times. Each is of its moment, but at the same time there's not much lost in translation — a great 'do is forever.
Pay a visit to Jono (short for Jonathan) Vaughan's Carrollwood home, as I did last week, and you'll find images like these — the Roman lady, a rococo babe — along with a photograph of the artist's own dramatically long locks, pinned to his studio wall. Like many artists' studios, Vaughan's space is filled with works-in-progress and the obligatory table encrusted with paint. The striking difference is that his converted one-car garage does double duty as a kind of temple.
A temple to hair.
Vaughan draws and paints the stuff — curling swirls and mussed thickets of it. Most of the hair in question is his, self-dyed in brilliant hues or painstakingly sculpted and curled with the help of local hairdressers, who swap labor with the artist to gain pictures for their own portfolios. Back in his studio, the photographs become drawings and paintings. (Or, in one case, a large black-and-white lithograph that depicts Vaughan in profile as a kind of studly Mozart, complete with temple curls.)
The drawings in particular exquisitely render hair's materiality — the way it twists, turns, flops, flows and shines. Delicious. If it's possible to make looking at the back of someone's head a sublime experience, Vaughan does it. But there's more than just visual description going on here.
This week, more than a dozen of Vaughan's works go on display at Collective, the art gallery and tattoo studio on St. Pete's 600 Block. The space routinely champions realistic figurative art — the kind that still sometimes can't gain a foothold in more conventional contemporary art galleries because it isn't seen as critical or conceptual enough. Vaughan, interestingly, is an example of someone with formal training (an MFA from USF) who speaks eloquently about his intentions and the big ideas that inform them but is also cool with the idea that it just looks amazing.
Consider the context — Collective — as fleshing out some of the concepts behind Vaughan's practice. Collective isn't just any tattoo studio; it's one that's unusually self-conscious and even reverent of tattoo as a tradition that melds art and design and takes the human body as its site. The space broadcasts this philosophy. Its sun-filled, clean-lined galleries adjoin the studio where, on computer screens and with needles, bodies are visually altered in ways that transform individual identities. I've seen Vaughan's work in other galleries (galleries not attached to tattoo studios), and in those spaces it comes across more formally, as an intensive exercise in drawing that just happens to take hair as its subject. Collective, on the other hand, throws into relief the exploration of identity that gets drawn out in the work.
I prefer the drawings that take Vaughan himself as their subject to a trio of paintings that depict the backs of three women's heads. The drawings possess a delicacy that the paintings don't, though the paintings are interesting on their own terms (e.g., for the way their thick, squishy impasto pushes something desirable — waves of womanly blond and brown hair — almost to the borders of the grotesque). In the drawings, Vaughan splits hair into strands of black, brown, yellow, red, green, blue and other colors, building up layers of feathery lines with colored pencil to create volumes of hair that you can almost imagine reaching a hand out to touch.
Their success hinges on the pleasure he takes in remaking his own image through changes to his hair (dyeing, styling) and in toying with gender ambiguity. He's a guy who's into a certain theater of style. (He cuts a dashing figure. When I arrived at the house where he and his wife live, he greeted me in a black vest over a white button up shirt and black jeans, wearing a dab of black eyeliner for dramatic effect.) Untroubled by — or at least unconcerned with adhering to — normative ideas of masculinity, Vaughan isn't afraid of finding ethereal beauty in the images he makes of himself or of looking like a pretty girl (particularly in the large-scale The Back of My Head).
Most of us, whether we've spent hours under the blow dryer or made the commitment to a tattoo or two, can identify with the joy of self-fashioning on view in Vaughan's drawings.
By the way, there is an unusual biographical back-story to his work. When Vaughan was growing up in England, his mother worked as a hairdresser, often from home. So there's a sense in which Vaughan just lives and breathes hair. Literally. If you get close to him after a dye job, he might even be able to tell what brand of color your salon uses.
This article appears in Apr 7-13, 2011.