Philip was brought up by English parents in Sainte Addresse, Le Havre, France where the family had moved shortly after the end of WW11 and he was sent to English boarding school at the age of 9. There he had the good fortune to meet Gordon Taylor, his first mentor at Brighton College who started him on a lifelong love of architecture, painting and sculpture. After a gap year hitchhiking all over Europe and into Turkey and Iran studying architecture and visiting museums, he returned to England. There he started his undergraduate studies at Cambridge University reading architecture and then transferred to Hornsey art College and later to Chelsea School of Art from where he graduated with first class honors in fine art. While working as graduate research assistant in Kinetics at Northumberland Polytechnic art school in Newcastle, Philip Vaughan won a competition for a large public artwork to be placed on the South Bank Centre, in London. He completed this, his first large public sculpture, the 45ft tall kinetic Neon Tower on the roof of the Hayward Gallery in 1972. He continued to work as sculptor in England and taught as a fine art lecturer in a number of British art schools, including two years teaching a foundation course at the City of London University, while he experimented in his studio in St Katherine’s Dock with inflatables, light sculptures and kinetics. Around this time he started to build a 42ft ocean-going sailing boat in Rotherhithe, in east London. In 1979 he sailed that boat across the Atlantic with his new wife Alice. Shortly after landing in Florida he found a job working for Walt Disney Imagineering designing and building dinosaurs, rides and sets for Disney’s EPCOT and Tokyo Disneyland theme parks. In 1988 he set up his own design company to work on museums, cultural projects and theme parks and he has been running that company ever since. The firm designs works principally for the Asia and the Far and Middle East markets and is a specialist in technical design solutions including ambitious public art projects. He has all along maintained his fine art career and passion, developing and showing his work as a fine artist, working out of his studio in Altadena, in the hills overlooking Los Angeles. His work includes sculpture, drawings, paintings and public art commissions. He works mainly on large abstract drawings on paper and paintings on canvas in his studio and continues to plan and build large public kinetic sculptures.
