MK Gallery, Milton Keynes
His work was so painstaking and slow to produce that the models – including a certain trainee barrister – often didn’t make it to the end of a portrait. It makes for paintings that seem drained of life

Euan Uglow, they say, is an artist’s artist, and therein lies the problem. If you were approaching his painstaking canvases out of curiosity – how to construct the figure, capture precise perspective, proportions – I can see how their visible workings (complex little dashes and crosses and plumb lines and geometric grids) would prove revelatory. But lots of us come to art to be inspired, transported, to feel. And for all their technical prowess, Uglow’s 70-odd regimented paintings at MK Gallery leave me cold.

First, some context, which we get immediately upon entering – in a slightly maddening move, the five-room retrospective of the artist opens with a room of seven paintings, of which only two are by him. After studying at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in London from 1948 to 1950, he moved to the Slade. He was influenced by Paul Cézanne and Alberto Giacometti, as well as three tutors, all of whom are represented here.