Euan Uglow: Drawing from Life

Drawing lies at the centre of Euan Uglow’s artistic practice and the works on display demonstrate the economy of line with which the artist captured a single figure’s mass and volume.

Uglow was notoriously technical and disciplined with his practice. The precise placement of heads and limbs were accurately recorded by plumb lines, measuring sticks, and props – devices made to steady limbs and determine lines of sight. Working from a fixed point marked on the floor, Uglow then began his exacting process, through which, in small increments, he would endow the model with ‘a form he could trust’. Raw traces of this programmatic and mathematical process emerge from the surface of the drawings. The lucid planes of light and warm shadows that appear across the compositions recall the artist’s fastidious monitoring of light and shadow in the studio and evoke the clarity of his conceptual process.

The drawings were integral to the development of Uglow’s paintings, as made apparent by the monumental and richly hued Standing Nude in Profile (c.1981). A drawing on display mirrors the pose in Double Square (1999-2000), now in the Yale Centre for British Art collection, and equally throws further light on the countless pictorial investigations performed by the artist before he fixed the figure onto canvas.

Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert and Frankie Rossi Art now represent the Euan Uglow Estate.