He is best known for his work on nude and still-life paintings. In Euan Uglows work you can see the measurements and corrections in his paintings that he used which gives the paintings lines which wouldn’t normally appear in a hyper-realistic painting but they do still look quite true to life. I find his work quite interesting due to the way that the measurement lines are left in and how you can see the different colours have changed but they still look quite realistic. By looking at the paintings I believe that the background is painted in before the figure is painted in. In the painting above The Wave 1989-97 Oil on canvas 19.5 x 39.5 in the measurement lines are quite obvious due to the curve in the back of the figure. The paintings that I find the most intriguing are the ones in which the face is quite hidden rather than shown or if there is a face the features have not been painted in which makes it more ambiguous. The measuring lines are a distinctive feature of Euan Uglow’s work and can be seen in most of his work, he mostly always worked from real life rather than from images, the marks that he would use he would also put done marks on the paintings and also sometimes on the model that he was using at that particular time. His mark making came from his mentor William Coldstream and so he also used a similar method of measuring, unlike his mentor Uglow chose to keep in the marks because he didn’t know when he might need the marks to refer back to. When you look at photos of his studio there were markings drawn on the floor which anchored the elements of his paintings and show how he positioned the models which sometimes made their way into the final painting, he had quite a mathematical approach when he was working out his proportions of a painting due to canvas size. The poses used are quite interesting as well due to the fact of the difficulty of the pose also becoming a model for Uglow was a huge commitment due to the fact he took sometimes years to complete a painting.
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/euan-uglow-2084
Alysha Fisk Research 