The former England cricket team captain has produced highly collectable art works for his new show.

“I have always had a real passion for art; to be able to combine it (my passion for art) with love of cricket has indeed been an enormous pleasure.” So says Michael Vaughan. The outcome is an exquisite abstract expressionism.

He hired a warehouse near his Yorkshire home to paint the new series of works. Vaughan created it by a method he terms ‘artballing’, hitting paint-daubed balls deftly at a blank canvas fixed to the wall. He relied on the hand-eye co-ordination, which once catapulted him to the position of the world’s top ranked batsman.

Vaughan, the Ashes-winning captain, is also England’s most successful skipper ever. He states that he’s always been keen on dabbling in art. Under the unlikely tutelage of his former team-mate Ashley Giles in the early 2000s he became properly tuned to it. Giles would take him to the galleries to check out the latest art shows.

Vaughan is showing his art at the Smithfield Gallery a mile west of Shoreditch in the first week of May. He has varied the color of his paints as well as his canvases, and also the number of ‘hits’ on each work. The choice of shot and his proximity to the canvas has also come into play. He even laid his canvas on the floor and bowled on to it.

The works fall somewhere between Damien Hirst’s Spot Paintings and Jackson Pollock’s abstract splats. Vaughan states he has a rather ‘decent idea of the image he wants to create’ before he actually starts.