Sage Vaughn was born outside of Ashland, Oregon in 1976. After a few feral years in the Oregon forests, he and his parents moved to the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. This move marked the beginning of his fascination with extracting the wilderness within the social environment. Birds on telephone lines, swarms of butterflies flying across the boulevard, blooms of wildflowers in urban lots, or coyotes roaming the freeways all inspire Sage’s work. Using a wide variety of media including painting, collage, installation, video, and sculpture, Vaughn poses the question of where the border between the interior and the exterior resides. For Vaughn, being an artist is a labor of merit. He believes he has the responsibility to expand our consciousness and potential, and to see how beautiful and savage the world really is. Art empowers the viewer, instigates the process of discovery, and not merely depicts the physical manifestations of reality but draws out the underlining complexities and richness of life.
His early WILDLIFE paintings juxtaposed commonplace songbirds with dreamlike metropolitan environments. Illustrating the similarities between the territorial qualities of his avian subjects and the people in his Los Angeles neighborhood. His signature manner of combining loose painting with intricate line work began to take shape with these early pieces.
Starting in 2013, Vaughn began the RING CYCLE paintings. These works were inspired by the Das Rheingold sequence of Wagner’s Ring Cycle Opera. By depicting swirling rings of migrating butterflies on a series of stark white canvases, Vaughn reimagined the conceptual prospect of life having more power in its synthetic state than in its natural form. The mass of continuous insects creates an unnatural arrangement that transcends the original beauty of an individual butterfly and focuses the viewers gaze towards the undeniable cumulative effect of the swarm. The lines of color dripping from the vortexes echo the fleeting existence of the subjects and belie the layered approach he takes in creating these works.
The notions of control and chaos were further explored when he began his WILDFLOWER series. As a meditation on control, the garden offers a myopic point of reassurance by extracting the beautiful components of the wilderness for one’s private contemplation. This novel approach to creating landscapes is obsessively detailed and uniform yet feel atmospheric and expansive. The illustrative quality of the tangles of flowers, fungi, snails, grasses, and other life forms, create an intricate network of lines over the exuberant and gestural Fauvist painted colors on the canvas. The visual language of these floral pieces has transcended into his sculptural works as well. Utilizing his field sketches of wildflowers, Vaughn has created numerous large-scale public sculpture works. This play on size disrupts the viewers’ impression of scale, giving them an instant of present moment awareness through the monumental depiction of a common local flower.
Throughout all of these works, Sage has championed the most beautiful and interesting aspects of our coexistence with the natural world. Survival, the common goal among every living organism on this planet, is not best portrayed by a chatty British guy who drinks his own urine while a film crew pretends he is alone, it is best represented by a flower: Blooming to exchange pollen with another organism and provide its genetic code a means to pass on beauty.
NOTE: 15% royalty to the artist on secondary market resales.
