Season’s greetings | Euan Uglow Christmas card at Austin/Desmond

Euan Uglow Christmas card (Handshake), c1960, woodcut. Courtesy of Austin/Desmond Fine Art

It must have been exciting to find a Euan Uglow Christmas card on the doormat. Every December, until his death in 2000, the London-based artist would think up a new design, and hand-produce around 300 cards to send out to friends and family.

Some years he made a (seemingly) simple print, like this clasped-hands woodcut from c1960, embellished with a personalised stamp, in post-box red to match the eye-catching thumbnail. Other years they would be more complex collages: angels with sycamore-seed wings; nudes with pistachio-shell breasts; brazen ladies with strokable red felt dresses.

These sweet, humorous offerings were a far cry from Uglow’s normal output. He produced landscapes, still lifes and portraits, but mostly he painted female nudes, asking his sitters to contort themselves into geometric shapes. This was highly demanding on his models, as he was a painstakingly slow painter, using a contraption fashioned out of an old music stand to measure distances and achieve accurate proportions. He was taught this method by William Coldstream, his tutor at Camberwell and the Slade. Like Piero della Francesca, whose work he adored, he often left his measurement marks on the canvas.

Paintings would take up to seven years, with several on the go at one time, in one of the many studio-rooms in his house in Clapham. One of his models was a student when she started posing, and a successful lawyer when the painting was completed. Another went through engagement, marriage and divorce before the work was accomplished. Cherie Booth (later Cherie Blair) sat for him over two years when she was a student: sadly the portrait was never completed, its whereabouts a great mystery.

Mind you, Uglow never considered his pieces to be completed. He simply reached a point when he decided to stop painting them. He would only produce two or three a year, each one an event. His style was essentially figurative, but owed a great deal to abstraction, comprising detailed geometrical studies of form and colour. He turned people into shapes: after visiting Egypt he asked one model to pose in the form of a pyramid. When she couldn’t achieve the yogic posture required of her, he sacked her, and found someone who could.

In his lifetime Uglow held regular exhibitions at Browse & Darby in London, and three of his paintings are currently (until January 24) on display at their Gallery Artists group show (see also Sit!). For more insight into Euan Uglow’s unique techniques, listen to critic Martin Gayford’s fine audio essay on the artist, broadcast by BBC Radio 3 in 2015.  

Artists’ Christmas cards regularly appear on the market, and examples by ModBrit painters and printers such as John Craxton, Eric Bawden, Eric Ravilious are highly sought after. This Uglow card is among a collection on show at Austin/Desmond’s viewing room until January 12, alongside works designed by David Jones, Alexander Mackenzie, Dennis Mitchell, Edward Wadsworth, CRW Nevinson, Mary Martin and Viola Paterson.