Euan Uglow

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Euan Uglow (March 10, 1932 – August 31, 2000) was an English figurative painter.

Uglow was born in London and studied at Camberwell College of Arts from 1948 to 1950 under William Coldstream, who influenced Uglow greatly. When Coldstream left to teach at the Slade School of Art, University College, London (London University) in 1951, Uglow transferred there as well. Starting in 1961, he himself was to teach part-time at the Slade School, continuing for many years.

Uglow is best known as a painter of the figure, particularly of female nudes, as well as portraits, still lifes and landscapes. His ostensibly simple compositions usually consist of a single figure in a setting emptied of extraneous detail; a typical still life may feature a single piece of fruit on a plain tabletop.

With a meticulous method of painting directly from life, Uglow frequently took months or years to complete a painting. Planes are articulated very precisely, edges are sharply defined, and colors are differentiated with great subtlety. His type of realism has its basis in geometry, starting with the proportion of the canvas. Uglow preferred that the canvas be a square, a golden rectangle, or a rectangle of exact root value, as is the case with the Root Five Nude (1976).^[1] He then carried out careful measurements at every stage of painting, a method Coldstream had imparted to him and which is identified with the painters of the Euston Road School. Standing before the subject to be painted, a brush would be held upright at arm's length. With one eye closed, the artist could, by sliding a thumb up or down the brush handle, take the measure of an object or interval, to compare against other objects or intervals, with the brush still kept at arm's length. Such empirical measurements enable an artist to paint what the eye sees without the use of conventional perspective. The surfaces of Uglow's paintings carry many small horizontal and vertical markings, where he recorded these coordinates so that they could be verified against reality.

Euan Uglow died in South London on August 31, 2000. His works are in numerous public collections, including:

The Arts Council of Great Britain
The British Museum, London
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Tate Gallery, London

In 2003, Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal mounted the first major exhibition of Euan Uglow's paintings since his death in 2000. Approximately fifty paintings, from every decade of Uglow's career,were shown, including portraits, nudes and still-lifes, as well as a group of Christmas cards made by the artist for his friends and family.

[edit] References

^ Lambirth, p. 29-30

Forge, Andrew, Euan Uglow, paintings and drawings, exhibition catalogue, Salander O'Reilly Galleries, New York, 1993.
Lambirth, Andrew, "A State of Emergency", Modern Painters, Summer 1993.
Wilcox, Tim, et al. (1990). The Pursuit of the Real: British figurative painting from Sickert to Bacon. London: Lund Humphries. ISBN 0-85331-571-X