Earth’s rhythms reflected in physicality of art

Since graduating from Glasgow School of Art with first class honours 22 years ago the painter Geoff Uglow has had a stellar career. He’s been showered with various awards by the Royal Scottish Academy and is represented by a major London gallery; his larger works command near-six-figure sums.

Uglow’s origins are, if not humble, then modest: he comes from a long line of Cornish farmers and his home and studio are built on family land. He’s a strong man: forthright, honest, intelligent and passionate. His paintings have the physicality, depth and energy you might expect from one so closely aligned to the land, the seasons, the rhythm of the earth as it orbits the sun, the ebb and flow of light and energy.

Uglow has created a rose garden crafting hybrids from the hundreds of varieties he has collected over the years. The roses bloom from spring to November and their colours range from bramble-purple and vermilion to apricot; their blowing scents create a sensory experience which Uglow captures and transmutes into paint.

In the massive diptych, Regina et Dux, his use of impasto oil paint has come to define one of his methods, although the energy of the paint exceeds Twombly or Auerbach. This is painting as sculpture, moved around like the clay his ancestors ploughed, shimmering furrows of deep colour, sometimes scraped back to reveal the canvas below.

Indeed, Uglow uses the lexicon of geomorphology to describe his work: “Colour can accumulate in low-lying areas, basins, canyons. There is folding and faulting in the structure of the paint . . .”

Uglow’s painting is not really about representation and depiction; rather, it’s a physical manifestation of emotion, something that has accumulated over time, layered with memory and experience. In his smaller works of the sea, he uses watercolour to capture the infinitely nuanced moods and texture of light and water over an hour; each of the small pieces in this sequence shows Uglow’s skill in a subtler medium. His paintings of Italy are, again, entirely different — recognisable landscape and place where the light is muted and blurred, and the tonal range confined.

Uglow has learnt well from his masters such as Turner, Corot and Morandi; but he creates something recognisably new and entirely his own.

Until January 29