London Memories, Chapter 3 Euan Uglow

Letting yourself be surprised by an unknown painter is something that rarely happens in life. As we move forward over the years, our taste builds and solidifies, making it increasingly difficult to incorporate (and remember) new forms of expression. We have so many references to good painting that we always end up discarding something new, coming to memory any other painter from whom he normally takes inspiration, without surpassing it.

Woman with a cap source

This did not happen when I saw Euan Uglow's paintings.

Euan Uglow's paintings exert a magnetic power on the viewer. He is a painter of an extraordinary density that excites the curiosity of the eye, which is eager to want to travel every square inch of the painting. Savouring each colour plane, each texture and letting yourself be seduced by the harmony that arises when the different planes are intertwined. A true visual delight.´

Still life source

Investigating I could learn that Uglow was extremely meticulous about the measurements. On some occasion, to avoid the fearsome parallax error when taking the measurements of the model, he made up a traveling shot of those used in the cinema industry. Uglow slid down the traveling and note down every measure he took with devoted Franciscan patience.
He learned this measurement technique at the Slade School of art from the very famous English art teacher, William Coldstream. Contrary to what happened in Europe after the Second World War, where the avant-gardes had evicted figurative art, giving way to abstract art in its multiple manifestations, in London, a kind of pictorial counter-reform emerged. Illustrious painters such as Lucien Freud or Francis Bacon are well known of that generation, however, Uglow knew how to conquer the hearts of English painting fans of later generations.
As an example, today, in the London Atelier of Reprentational Art (a painting school in South London that claims the sight-size method, where young art students learn classical painting ressources) usually performs life-drawing sessions with the same poses as the models in Uglow's paintings.

Portraits source

The execution of a woman's portrait could take years. The picture began when the woman was single, continued it when she was married, and finally ended it when she had already divorced. I thought that the 105 poses that Picasso's portrait of Gertrud Stein lasted could not be overcome. Uglow then pays tribute to the transtemporal woman, reaching its essence through the years. All those hours, all those years posing, transfer a huge amount of information to the canvas, Uglow manages however to locate all that information creating an eternal image of his model.

Charles Baudelaire wrote that a good painter is one who is capable of synthesizing nature into a unit and that unit then creates a pictorial memory in the viewer and in the collective memory. With the arrival of abstract art, that pulse was broken and the successive works that contemporary art produces are made for rapid consumption without significance.
Uglow has managed to reconcile modernity with the past. His images are so powerful that they enter the espectator’s visual memory and know how to find their place in memory.