Opening batsman Michael Vaughan hits a sublime 183 to steer England towards an all-too-rare victory over Australia. We still end up losing the Ashes series 4-1, but here at last was an Englishman who knew which end of the bat to hold. Liberally sprinkled with exquisite cover drives and pull shots, the innings left even the most Pom-loathing spectator in awe. 'Vaughan's stroke play was pure artistry,' reported one Sydney newspaper.
Six years on, and those words have taken on a wholly unexpected, new significance. After missing out on selection for the winter tours to India and the West Indies, the ever-creative Vaughan – England captain from mid-2003 until last summer – has hired a warehouse unit near his Yorkshire home and taken up painting. Improbable as it sounds, he's actually proving as prolific at the canvas as he once was at the crease: Vaughan's produced more than 60 paintings since Christmas.
Not that there's a single brush or easel to be seen, as I visit the artiste at work. His is a warehouse unit as cold and cavernous as any other, yet infinitely more colourful, with circular spots of paint all over the white walls and tarpaulin, black floor. 'Right, let's play some shots,' says Vaughan, brandishing a Gunn & Moore bat, also covered in marks of myriad hues. You see, this isn't painting in the conventional sense. Vaughan creates his works by a method he calls 'artballing', that is hitting paint-daubed balls at a blank canvas that's fixed to the wall.
'I've a very active mind, and I'm always thinking about cricket,' says Vaughan, England's Ashes-winning captain in 2005 and most successful skipper ever, with 26 wins. 'Last December I happened to be at home, not on tour, so instead of thinking too much about the England team, I was free to [think up] the concept of artballing.'
Vaughan, now 34, made his international debut in 1999, and – apart from during a knee-injury rehabilitation in 2006 – barely missed a game thereafter, until quitting the England captaincy last August. At his resignation press conference, after the home series defeat to South Africa, he cut a tearful, exhausted figure, in need of a good haircut. Has the art been therapeutic?
'Most definitely. By the last months as captain, my head was cluttered with too much noise. I started to worry about every decision I made. With the art… [it's been good] to get away from cricket and switch off those thought processes required to captain at the highest level, the day-in day-out questioning of yourself and the team.'
Vaughan says he's always been interested in contemporary art, but only in the early 2000s – under the unlikely tutelage of England team-mate Ashley Giles – did he become properly 'turned on' to it. A humdrum spin-bowler, Giles had a trundling run-up so unartistic he earned the nickname 'Wheelie Bin'. Hard to imagine him as an apostle of hip new art.
'On rained-off afternoons, during a London Test match, he'd take me down to the galleries in Shoreditch to check out the latest shows,' says Vaughan. And how did the East End trendies react to having the England cricket captain in their midst? 'The majority didn't have a clue who we were, to be honest.'
Come shot five, and the blue blob has flashed past me once again. Why? It's not so much the speed of the shots. Rather that Vaughan is rolling back the years before my very eyes, and I'm transfixed by the close-up view of that gorgeous cover drive – front-foot forward, head still, bat face slightly open, clean strike, follow-through, and flourishing finish. Forget the resulting canvases, this is performance art of the top level.
'What I really like about the images is their variety,' says Vaughan, who varies the colour of both his paints and his canvases, as well as the number of 'hits' on each painting, his choice of shot, and also his proximity to the canvas. Occasionally, Vaughan puts the bat down and throws balls, instead of hitting them; very occasionally, he even lays his canvas on the floor and bowls on to it.
The artball works fall somewhere between Jackson Pollock's abstract splats and Damien Hirst's Spot Paintings: not as regimented in layout as the latter, yet not as spontaneous as the former. Vaughan says he has a 'decent idea of what image [he wants] to create' before he starts, and then relies on the hand-eye co-ordination that once catapulted him to No 1 in the world batting rankings to execute that idea. He picks his spot and goes for it, just like he used to when piercing opposition fields.
Perhaps surprisingly, the end result is simple and stylish, not fussy and messy. Vaughan's unmixed colours are vibrant, and the cricket-ball seam makes for a richly textured impression. Who says, in this big-hitting era of Twenty20 cricket, the 'art of batting' is dead?
Vaughan admits, though, he isn't actually English cricket's finest artist. Not in the traditional sense anyway. Apparently, that distinction belongs to modern-day Morandi, Paul Collingwood. The much-maligned batsman 'is really good at still lifes', says Vaughan. 'Whenever he's out for none, he'll go back to the dressing room and draw the boots, bags and bats [scattered about] the floor.'
'I'm looking to take the artballing further, and hopefully getting other cricketers, and even players of other sports, to do a bit.' Depending on the Smithfield show's success, Lee Westwood is being lined up to produce some golfing canvases, and there's also talk of Frank Lampard producing some football ones – assuming he could ever manage to hit the canvas. 'Before all that, though,' says Vaughan, 'I'm hoping myself to recreate a couple of the centuries I'll score against Australia this summer.'
