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Euan Ernest Richard Uglow (10 March 1932 – 31 August 2000) was a British painter. He is best known for his nude and still life paintings, such as German Girl and Skull.
Born in London, he studied at the Camberwell School of Art. His instructors included William Coldstream, whose meticulous method of painting from life involved repeated, careful measurements. Uglow continued his studies under Coldsteam at the Slade School of Art until 1954, and later taught there. Uglow's adaptation of Coldstream's method of painting included the use of a metal instrument of his own design with which he could take the measure of an object or interval to compare against other objects or intervals in his field of vision. By the use of such empirical measurements he contrived to paint what the eye sees without the use of conventional perspective. Uglow's finished paintings display the many small horizontal and vertical markings with which he recorded these coordinates so that they could be verified against reality.
Public collection holding Uglow's works include the Tate Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Wales.
Refusing compulsory military service, Uglow was registered as a conscientious objector in 1954, and spent two years undertaking community work, assisting in the restoration of a war-damaged church by Christopher Wren in the City of London, redecorating the house of the artist Patrick George, and helping on a farm in Surrey.June Ducas, 'The irresitable Mr Uglow, in The Daily Telegraph (London newspaper), 5 April 1997
Success in art was not immediate, and he did not sell a painting until eight years after leaving art school. During this time he took a variety of part-time teaching jobs, most notably at the Slade from 1961, an institution with which he was to be associated for the rest of his life.
In 1962, he was at the centre of a storm at the municipal art gallery in Bradford, Yorkshire, when a local councillor, Horace Hird, had one of Uglow's paintings, German Girl, removed from an Arts Council exhibition at the gallery.'Nude portraits cause uproar in England', in The Dispatch, (newspaper from Lexington, North Carolina), 22 August 1962, p.2 Hird claimed the painting 'offended decency'.'Nude Paintings Taken Down', in The Herald (Glasgow newspaper), 21 August 1962, p.7
Despite this, Uglow was generally a shy artist who shunned publicity as well as honours, including an offer to become a member of the Royal Academy in 1961.Keith Perry, 'UK's 'unknown' master painter dies of cancer', in The Guardian (London newspaper), 1 September 2000 However, he did become a trustee of the National Gallery in London in 1991, although, in his own words, he was generally ignored by the other trustees.June Ducas, 'The irresistible Mr Uglow, in The Daily Telegraph (London newspaper), 5 April 1997
Uglow's first solo show was in 1961 at the Beaux Arts Gallery, but his slow and methodical working method did not lead to a large number of solo shows. In 1969 he exhibited drawings at the Gardener Centre at Sussex University, in 1974 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London and then periodically at the Browse & Darby Gallery in London. He also took part in numerous group shows, including an exhibition of the London Group. He won the John Moores Painting Prize, awarded in Liverpool, in 1972. In 1981 he took part in the exhibition Eight Figurative Painters at the University of Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, United States, and in 1984 in The Hard Won Image at the Tate Gallery, London. In 1992 he featured in the exhibition British Figurative Painting of the 20th Century at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and in 2000 in the exhibition Encounters at the National Gallery in London. In 2002 a posthumous retrospective was organised by the Arts Council for England, entitled Spotlight on Euan Uglow, which toured around Britain. In 2003 there was a retrospective Euan Uglow: Controlled Passion, Fifty Years of Painting at the Abbot Hall Gallery, in Kendal.
In 1980, Uglow was invited by the artist Stass Paraskos to become the first artist-in-residence at the new Cyprus College of Art arts centre in village of Lempa on the island of Cyprus.Michael Paraskos, et al., Stass Paraskos (London: Orage Press, 2010)
He has work in the collections of the Arts Council of England, the British Council, the National Museum of Wales, the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull, Glasgow Art Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Southampton City Art Gallery, the British Government Art Collection, the Tate Gallery and The Hepworth in Wakefield.
Uglow died of liver cancer at his home in Wandsworth, London, in 2000.
As this indicates, Uglow worked directly from life, and one of the features of his paintings was that he did not attempt to hide the process of construction. Remnants of the measurements he took and the drawing guide he used remain visible in the finished paintings.Christopher Andreae, 'Figurative Art Isn't What It Used To Be', in The Christian Science Monitor, 5 June 1990 This was a process that Uglow developed from his early studies under William Coldstream,Sebastian Smee, 'The artist who would not doubt', in The Daily Telegraph (London newspaper), 30 July 2003 and it was to become a mainstay of teaching at the Slade School of Art in London tying into an already long standing emphasis on drawing there. The result was paintings that had a strong sculptural quality, but within the tradition of the shallow picture plane of modernism, particularly as it was understood by Cézanne, although Uglow's work has also been compared to the simple classicism of the Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca particularly for the way he would make his life models pose in ways to emphasise simple geometric shapes.Unsigned obituary, 'Euan Uglow', in The Daily Telegraph (London newspaper), 1 September 2000 Planes are articulated very precisely, edges are sharply defined, and colours are differentiated with great subtlety.
Uglow preferred that his canvas be a square, a golden rectangle, or a rectangle of exact square root value, as is the case with the Root Five Nude (1976).Lambirth, Andrew, "A State of Emergency", Modern Painters, Summer 1993 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, Uglow registered measurements by means of a metal instrument of his own design (derived from a modified music stand); with one eye closed and with the arm of the instrument against his cheek, keeping the calibrations at a constant distance from the eye, the artist could take the measure of an object or interval to compare against other objects or intervals he saw before him. 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.
Colour was fundamental to his understanding, and painters such as Henri Matisse and the Venetians influenced him all his artistic life along with many others, although perhaps Cézanne, Giorgio Morandi, Nicolas Poussin and Ingres were closest to his heart. Uglow described to an interviewer the inspiration for his still life Lemon (1973):
I'll tell you what Lemon is about ... It's the dome at Volterra that Brunelleschi was supposed to have helped with. It's most beautiful, very simple, very lovely. I couldn't paint the dome there, so when I came back I thought I'd try to paint it from a lemon.Zagi (1981–82), which depicts a standing nude, was inspired by a children's toy of an acrobat, with the word Zagi itself being Chinese for acrobat.Life: The Observer Magazine - A celebration of 500 years of British Art - 19 March 2000
Uglow's paintings made whilst he was an artist-in-residence at the Cyprus College of Art in 1980 and again in 1983 are almost wholly landscapes, and he used the clear summer skies of Cyprus as a stark contrast of flat colour against the geometrical and sculptural forms he painted at ground level.Christopher Woodward, 'Behind the scenes at the museum', in The Guardian (London newspaper), 16 December 2006 But Uglow was also well travelled to other countries, spending six months in Italy on a Prix de Rome scholarship in 1953, and later making work in France, Spain, Morocco, Turkey, India and China.
One of the most notable paintings made by Uglow was a nude painting of Cherie Booth, future wife of the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, left unfinished in 1978. Art critic Frank Whitford, writing in The Sunday Times has jokingly suggested Uglow made such an impression on the young Cherie that 30 years later the Blairs named their son after him.Frank Whitford, 'The Sunday Times best art books of 2007', in The Sunday Times (London newspaper), 25 November 2007. His Articulation (1993-95) features a reclining nude woman with her back to the viewer, with a tree branch in the background; actress Lisa Coleman was the model.
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