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“Nobody has ever looked at you as intensively as I have.” Euan Uglow once directed those words towards one of his models, conscious of the depth and penetration of his act of scrutinity and somehow justifying the endless posing sessions. A model who began posing for him when she was a young law student ended the sessions married and a practising lawyer of some prestige.
Euan Uglow at his study
Euan Ernest Richard Uglow (10 March 1932 – 31 August 2000) was a London painter who is today a source of inspiration and a point of reference for many contemporary figurative artists. He was perhaps the most outstanding English painter of his time. His artistic career began at the tender age of 15 when he was accepted into the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in London. There, he was recognised by his fellow students and teachers as a talented young man who was passionate about painting. He completed his studies at the Slade School of Fine Art, also in London. During those student years, he was influenced by three English artists from the previous generation who taught classes there: Claude Rogers, William Coldstream and Victor Pasmore. He was especially influenced by Coldstream, who passed on his obsession for geometric precision and measurement and with whom he would later enjoy a long friendship. Coldstream’s school used specific horizontal and vertical lines to calculate spatial reference points. This technique has its roots in the mathematical methods that Renaissance artists such as Piero della Francesca regularly employed. It was about ensuring the certainty of the observation – what classical Italians called “certezza” – whilst being fully aware that there was never a time when the intrincate challenges of depicting the model were exhausted.
Influences
Uglow must have felt like he was swimming against the tide with his figurative proposition, while abstract art, revered by the critics, reigned supreme in the exhibition halls and at auctions. In his time at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, Euan Uglow was steeped in a much more cosmopolitan environment, one that allowed him to be in contact with the artistic elite of the era: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and, especially, Giacometti, for whom he had a profound admiration. He was able to visit the latter several times at his studio, and confirm his eternal obsession for completing the diminutive figures that he would tirelessly create then destroy. Like Giacometti, Uglow was very much influenced by the French existentialist movement, and he recognised the impact that writers such as Sartre and Camus had on his painting. The character of Grand, from Albert Camus’s novel “The Plague”, who endlessly writes and rewrites the first sentence of a novel, appears to have been inspired by them.
He also admired artists who appeared to be in the opposite extreme of his pictorial proposition: Pollock, Newman and, in particular, Mark Rothko. He perhaps took from them an understanding of the formal dynamics of the colour planes that he applied when elaborating and constructing the backgrounds of his compositions. However, Uglow possessed the ability to integrate these new stimuli without breaking the link with the past; the Italian Renaissance, and painters such as Poussin and Cezanne who were always present in his painting. As with so many other painters throughout history, he brought back a more brilliant and revitalising palette from his travels to Italy.
Euan Uglow Skull 1952
Euan Uglow’s development as a painter is almost linear. He found his path early on and, without losing direction, became evermore lucid and revealing. A work from his first period marks a slight turning point that affirms his pictorial proposition; “The Skull” is a painting he never wanted to sell. Uglow sets the skull beside a damask that was made by himself. His aim was to invite the viewer to take part in the process and share his analytical way of looking at the motif, thereby excluding observations based on emotions or religion. This method of preparing his scenes was almost a constant in his work. As with Piero della Francesca, Euan Uglow sought an inherent state of harmony, with the arrangement of both the model and the backgrounds forming part of the pictorial process. Precision and measurement were elements used to favour harmony and composition. He never felt enslaved by the limitations of painting only what he could see. In his own words, “A picture could be right without being like”.
Euan Uglow Subject matter
Euan Uglow focused almost exclusively on still life and the representation of the human figure. He painted few landscapes and, as this was a subject matter that precluded his customary long sessions in the studio, he applied a synthetic method, producing unusual paintings with large, flat, colourful masses that are extremely beautiful in their simplicity and timelessness.
Euan Uglow Standing nude 1951-52
From his student days his attention centred on the representation of the human figure. He always worked from nature and would try to penetrate so deeply, into both an understanding of his models and their representation, that he realised the process could be infinite.
On one occasion during his art school days, Uglow was in the atelier with some fellow students, completely absorbed in finishing a painting. The skin of the model, who was standing, displayed subtle variations in colour, produced by a nearby heater. It seems that Lucian Freud had been trying to seduce her, and, when he appeared in the classroom, the young woman blushed from head to toe. Uglow, who could not bear to see the chromatic subtleties of her skin changing, was exasperated and pleaded with Freud to not show his face round there again.
Euan Uglow technique
The most important and persistent of the formal and conceptual features in Euan Uglow’s work all relate to vision and proportion. Regarding the last of these, Uglow shaped his pictorial space with great care, setting a scene beforehand in which all the elements had been carefully studied. He would place plumb lines and sighting strings and other aids as spatial reference points. These elements would then be reflected in the painting using small marks made with either a pencil or thin, coloured brushstrokes. He would then leave them in the final work, thereby making the viewer a participant in the creative process.
The painting’s dimensions would also have to be kept to specific measurements, in order to start with what he called proper or “positive” rectangle. If the vertical dimension was 1, for example, then the horizontal length would have to be the square root of two; 1.41, approximately. This would result in measurements of 25.4 x 36 cm, or multiples of them. Uglow explained that this did not involve mystical proportions, but ones related to composition and harmony. In his opinion, simplicity and clarity were inherent virtues of pictorial representation: “I like to have an ordered rectangle, a shape with reason”.
His work surface was usually highest-quality Belgian linen canvas that he would sometimes buy primed. At other times, he would prepare it himself using the traditional method involving rabbit-skin glue and subsequent white lead primer. Meticulous in everything he did, he would use drawing tacks instead of staples, and preferred the stretcher to be made of birch wood rather than redwood.
Although he experimented with acrylic on several occasions, Euan Uglow always used oil as his natural means of expression. To him, it seemed an ideal and seductive medium. As he said himself: “it has marvellous clarity…is so extraordinarily flexible…the idea of having transparent colours and opaque colours… I have a dipper and usually 13 or 14 colours out, going from white through the yellows, reds, blues and greens to raw umber and black, from right to left”. He would paint in the usual, fat-over-lean manner, and he did not mind going back and removing paint if a painting was not going according to plan. He would take great care to keep his colours clean and free of contamination, and would wash his brushes thoroughly. He would sometimes keep a specific tone in reserve, and immersed in water, so that he could start painting again with the exact same colour when required.
The poetry of precision
Reflecting on the painting of Euan Uglow, the painter John Mclean described it thus: “These planes of Uglow’s stand for color changes perceived with a keenness one might have said bordered on the hallucinatory, were it not reality that was in focus…His observation is so exquisite each discrete plane, each colour rings out, like a note in a finely delivered song. The planes coalesce just like sounds”
Euan Uglow tried to understand reality, to puzzle out light and transfer its fleeting and three-dimensional nature to the two dimensions of a painting. He made use of geometry, precision and measurement in that never-ending quest not to copy, but to shape an idea that based on such rational elements, paradoxically, finds itself transformed into a poetry full of harmony and timelessness.
Resources
“Euan Uglow the complete paintings” A comprehensive book about Uglow: excellent reproductions, more than 400 works, 2 essays and a chronology. A must for Uglow work lovers
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