In April 1965 Vaughan visited Morocco with his doctor and friend Patrick Woodcock and their trip had a profound influence on his picture making. His subject matter changed dramatically after visiting the colourful, exotic markets in Marrakesh, Taroudant and Casablanca and then driving through the Atlas Mountains. On his return, acrobats, snake charmers, horsemen and camel drivers were added to his list of subjects. He wrote in his journal:
‘Marvelous landscape driving up the coastal road from Agadir. Dry, luminous scrubby foothills, cinnamon pink to olive – white dotted with dark olives & patches of glowing saturated colour from the people working in the fields. Camels, oxen or donkeys harnessed to the ploughs. Flocks of black, brown & white goats. Shepherd boys in bluish white djellabas…storks fly overhead… like living in the Old Testament…Light cotton djellabas start indigo & bleach through every tone of the colour until they become nearly white.’
1965 was a pure gouache year for Vaughan; he abandoned oil painting altogether and did not produce any paintings on canvas. He worked in a frenzy, painting sometimes from morning to late evening:
’July 26: 1965: The routine continues. I start the day with gouache. I have no particular idea in mind, but there is nothing else to do. After breakfast, I get out the pots and jars and rags and paper. It is quite systematized now. I have been doing it since last November. Like everything else – compulsive. And it adds up to agonised futility. Yet the effect of it is no more futile than other people’s routine. But mine is solitary. It involves no one else. I have done more gouaches that ever can be shown or sold. Yet I continue to do them because there is nothing else I can do.’
By June he had painted sixty-one works and, by the end of the year, he had completed around one hundred and thirty gouaches. In October 1965 The Marlborough New London Gallery put on a major exhibition of sixty-nine of them, including thirty of the Moroccan paintings. It was certainly Vaughan’s best gouache work to date both in terms of his technical assurance, poetic vision and fluid application of the pigment. Inexplicably the show failed to sell, which seems extraordinary today, and it shocked Vaughan:
‘October 3, 1965: Show of gouache a complete failure. Disagreeable. Sold 6 out of 70. My first taste of failure…In fact I almost decided to give up. Subjective meanderings are no good at all. Problem of what to do instead. Very hard to find any stimulus to start painting when some 64 works are about to come home to be stored somewhere.’