EUAN UGLOW, Curled nude on a stool, huile sur toile, 76x100 cm, 1982-83

Euan Uglow (1932-2000) He was a figurative painter of what has been called the School of London, and his reputation was built on hard-won images, on relentless looking and describing. His art was founded on empirical measurements, on constant revisions, on a technique that was anything but flashy. His paintings bore the imprint of his repeated returns to the minutiae of observation. ...

Uglow was a student at the Slade of William Coldstream, whose own life paintings had about them a chilling air of self-denial, and Uglow went on to develop Coldstream's approach through his own years of teaching in the same art-college life room. To me, it always smelled like a death room; every year a new crop of belated Euston Road painters would emerge from it, their pallid painted figures nicked with little registration points and tiny painted crosses, like so many torture victims, done-over in shades of umber and grey.

A style like any other, this was and is a look masquerading as a moral quest. About it all hangs an air of futility, and a sense of something murdered....

Uglow's own paintings are, on the other hand, often colourful, but it feels like studio colour rather than the uncontrollable colour and light of the world. His blues are always the same blue, the reds and pinks invariably mixed from the same base hues, whether he is painting skin, the studio floor tiles or the decorated facade of a church in Cypress. Not that Uglow ever used much paint in any case. Like so much else in his art, touch is suppressed and pleasure is deferred. In the end, there is something fussy about Uglow's art. He lets you see all his difficulties, all those mechanical notations, the surveyor's plot-lines under the paint. This is an irritating affectation, and I find it hard to ignore his tiresome marginalia. It is as if he wanted us never to forget how much trouble he had. ...

Uglow liked a good shape, but always took the hardest route to achieve it. He either didn't trust pure imagination, or it was too volatile and dangerous for him. Clearly, the act of painting, and ordering his perceptions, meant more to Uglow than the painting itself. 
By Adrian Searle.