White Pear

Still-life forms an essential part of Euan Uglow’s oeuvre, serving as the perfect vehicle for his career-long exploration into the nature of pictorial representation. Painted in 1960, White Pear encapsulates the intense scrutiny Uglow fixed upon his subjects, as he sought to meticulously capture the structure and essence of an object throughout his artistic career.

Pictured on a small and intimate scale, the harmony between the solid object and its shadow is striking, the solitary pear’s curved form further echoed in the background of the composition. As in many of Uglow’s paintings, the object or figure under the artist’s scrutiny derives its uniqueness from the strange, heightened sense of reality that Uglow is able to bestow upon his subjects. This unique sense of ‘heightened’ realism is of a wholly pictorial nature and is attained by a slow, painstaking practice of observation, measurement, correction and a pictorial balancing of proportion that reconstructs an image upon a demonstrably flat and fictious two-dimensional surface. ‘Art is artifice’, Uglow used to insist. ‘It’s nothing to do with being true to life. You’re trying to construct a new world so that it can stand: nothing to do with illusionism’ (Euan Uglow quoted in exhibition catalogue, Euan Uglow, Controlled Passion: Fifty Years of Painting, Kendal, Abbot Hall Gallery, 2003, p. xxxviii).