Euan Uglow (1932 - 2000) was a painter of national and international distinction and an Honorary Fellow of the London Institute. This National Touring Exhibition from the Hayward Gallery finishes its tour around the UK when it comes to London in September. Spotlight on Euan Uglow brings together six paintings and four drawings from the Arts Council Collection, and offers an opportunity to look again at his work. When he died in August 2000, an obituary writer observed that 'a light in English painting has gone out'.

The works include an early still life, a profile of a girl, a mosque in Turkey and three nudes, including the important painting, The Quarry Pignano, 1979-80. Of the four life drawings also shown, Girl Close-To, 1968, is one of the few never intended as a preparatory study, but considered by the artist as a complete work.

Uglow had many admirers, including David Sylvester, Paul Smith and Cherie Blair. His extraordinary paintings were long in the making, pursuing the same objective year after year, using traditional methods and a narrow range of subjects - the model in the studio, portraits, still life and landscape. William Coldstream and the Euston Road School, and its search for visual truth, were important influences. However, Uglow's power lies in the calm and assured way that the motifs hold their place on the canvas and the rich tonal compositions. He gave the same attention to arranging a still life or a model's pose as he would later give to applying paint on canvas, combining mathematical calculation with careful observation.

The exhibition is accompanied by a Spotlight leaflet by Catherine Lampert, former director of Whitechapel Art Gallery, and a close friend of the artist.

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Canvas

    A piece of cloth woven from flax, hemp or cotton fibres. The word has generally come to refer to any piece of firm, loosely woven fabric used to paint on. Its surface is typically prepared for painting by priming with a ground.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.