For Sage Vaughn, being an artist presents an opportunity to be heard, most importantly on issues that make society squirm. The LA artist likens his series Garden Variety, now on show at Woodbury House, to the music of Steely Dan: “Beautiful on the surface, but some really heavy shit underneath.”

At the core of the works is an anti-war sentiment that reflects the efforts of society to mask and glaze over disasters and mistakes. Many of the works feature Francisco Goya’s Disaster of War sketches, as Vaughn layers flowers and mushrooms over the Spanish painter’s macabre depictions of the effects of conflict. 

Here Vaughn takes us through his processes, the meaning behind the works, and the poignancy inherent in Goya’s Disasters – which, due to their critical nature, weren’t published in the artist’s lifetime. 

Aminah Khan: You were previously a street artist in LA, right? Would you say that comes through in the way you drop paint, and is there any kind of symbolism in this technique?
Sage Vaughn: For the record, I was never strictly a street artist, I did a little vandalism (a little more than most, a lot less than a few legends). I was a kid growing up in the San Fernando Valley and there was nothing to do besides tear up the suburban environment. Everyone I knew skated, smoked tons of weed, and timidly wrote graffiti. I think I get a bit too fussy in parts of my work, so the drips started as an exercise of letting go.

Aminah: Your body of work expresses an anti-war sentiment, specifically pertaining to conflicts the US is involved in. What would you say is the impact of artists expressing their views of the political landscape through their work?
Sage: It’s a toss up: on one side, you have poets and artists going to prison or being executed during quite a few South American revolutions in the last century. There you have a concrete example of art making a vast impact, that it makes the powers that be nervous. On the other hand, so much of our attention span is being evaporated or distracted, I don’t know if the impact is the same. I’m not saying it’s not important, I just think it is different. Guernica vs Instagram.

Aminah: Within your work, you’ve chosen to incorporate some of Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War sketches. Why these specifically?
Sage: I grew up looking at Goya a lot. My grandma had a couple of prints in her house from his Los Caprichos series but I found his Disasters series later. Those works were never published during his lifetime – as they were too critical of the establishment. I saw his frustration in those pieces. It was great recreating them; making the same marks his hand made, and then covering them up. Putting flowers on soldiers’ graves.

“The flowers do represent the effort we put forth to distract ourselves from the problems we’ve caused… Glossing over the fact we elected a pussy grabbing reality star as president takes a lot daisies.”

Aminah: Why were you specifically drawn to the use of flowers? Do they reflect the efforts of society to mask and glaze over disasters instigated by society itself?
Sage: I’ve been working on the idea of gardens for the past three years. Flowers have a lot of meaning, as a visual object, but they are also a great vehicle for colour. A painting is just colour and surface, so sometimes it’s nice to have something dynamic in regards to colour. Earlier this year, the garden imagery became a language. A language I could use across mediums and a language I became fluent enough in to allow me to discuss other sentiments besides flowers.

In these works the flowers do represent the effort we put forth, consciously and unconsciously, to distract ourselves from the problems we’ve caused. Huge, messy fucking problems. Problems with extremely dire consequences. It’s like the masks full of flowers the priests wore during the plague, but in a less biological sense. Glossing over the fact we elected a pussy grabbing reality star as president takes a lot daisies.

“The bottom half of the [sculpture] works are made from big pieces of wood I carve with a chainsaw – a lot of chaos, zero precision.”

Aminah: There are a lot of contrasts in the series – like industrial instruments like chainsaws, clashed with naturally forming things like wood. What was the thinking behind such contrasts?
Sage: The garden vs wildflowers. Control vs chaos. The sculptures are part made by machine and part made by me. So much calculated effort on one side and so much release on the other.

Aminah: Would you classify this body of work as a form of protest, against the damage and suffering caused by ongoing conflicts?
Sage: It started as such, but now I would say it’s much more of a response. I thought these works would be a discussion of the tragic effects of constant, unending war, but after the amount of effort it took to transform the horrific images Goya created, I found myself thinking of the vast amount of diversions we maintain to keep our attention from the horrible effects of our poor decisions. Every time I type “Goya” my computer wants to correct it to “yoga”. That’s kind of what we’re talking about, a few steps removed, right?

Aminah: What were your reasons behind using the juxtapositions of metal and wood in the creation of the sculptures?
Sage: The paintings have a very tight and exact line-work lattice, with a very loose application of colour underneath. The sculptures have a similar formula: the line work is translated through a water jet machine into an aluminium object – it’s totally technical and precise. But the bottom half of the works are made from big pieces of wood I carve with a chainsaw – a lot of chaos, zero precision. Then I paint them.

Aminah: What would you like people to take away from your series?
Sage: They’re like Steely Dan songs: beautiful on the surface, but some really heavy shit underneath.

‘Garden Variety’ by Sage Vaughn is showing by appointment until June at Woodbury House Soho, London W1D 7AZ