EUAN UGLOW - Form, Color and Space

EUAN UGLOW - Form, Color and Space

One of my favorite British painters is Euan Uglow ( 1932 - 2000 ). His work is painterly, precise and visually compelling. He worked from life almost exclusively and focused mostly on still-life, interiors and the figure. Uglow studied with William Coldstream at the Slade School of Art and is considered a contemporary of Lucien Freud.

There are many reasons I’m drawn to his work so l’ll start with the idea of color spot painting, an approach to seeing color by Charles Hawthorne. I find similarities in the way these two artists thought about color from…

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DRAWING HIDEAWAYS

DRAWING HIDEAWAYS

Did you know there’s a Natural History Museum in Portland? Much to my surprise there is, at Portland State University!  Fellow artist Patrick Dolan told me about it, so off I went with students in the Mentored Drawing Studio on a field trip! 

What I find neat about drawing animals is that you not only learn about anatomy, they’re challenging to draw too!  Organizing the complexity of a skeleton into it’s most basic forms and drawing it in a way that’s…

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PHOTO-SURREALISM IN PORTLAND?

A modest yet impressive exhibit of photo-surrealism is on display at Blue Sky Gallery this month. 

Artist J Swofford’s work is featured in a corner of the gallery reserved for up and coming Pacific Northwest artists called the Viewing Drawer. His prints are small, intimate and evoke another era.

I like the imagery, their hand-made feel and ambiguity going on in the process. Is it old-school collage? Of the digital realm or other photo/print process?  Out of curiosity I looked up several meanings of surrealism and found:

a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature that sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images.

Yes… well done J Swofford. To view more of this artist’s work visit: www.abnormalimage.com.