The newspapers last Friday reported the death of the British artist Euan Uglow, who was apparently one of Britain's great but under-appreciated artists, a master painter seriously underestimated by the public at large, though highly respected by colleagues and by many in the artistic world.
Uglow was known for a unique style of structured painting based on rigorous examination of the subject matter - and also for his perfectionism: "No one can be perfectionist enough," he once said. "I've just got to go to a great deal of trouble. What's the point of being slack about painting if it's the most important thing you do in your life? Pointless."
He is quite right. But perfectionism is much misunderstood. It has little to do with the pathetic Nike slogan, "Just do it", supposedly calling up the Olympic dreams of faster, higher, further. Perfection is much more about slowing down one's work to a glacial pace, if necessary. This was perfectly understood by Euan Uglow, who rarely produced more than a couple of paintings a year, and indeed often spent years on a single painting.
In pursuit of this perfection, Uglow demanded that his models sustain positions which were difficult emotionally and physically: "They may only come once a week. While I am painting they often go through a cycle of personal events. When one model first arrived, she had a boyfriend. Later she married, and by the time I was done, she was divorced."
Well, I ought to know, having been the original boyfriend of the model in question, a beautiful young Uzbekestani woman named Svetlana.
While Euan and Svetlana were creating perfection in the studio, and Svetlana's cycle of personal events was getting under way, my own cycle of personal events involved painting our rather depressing basement flat in Battersea. Svetlana had been rather disappointed when I first showed her the flat. She thought it little better than what she had left behind her in the hamlet she had fled in Uzbekistan after unspecified incidents involving a lecherous uncle.
I promised to paint the flat, but this set Svetlana off on another tirade. When we first got together and I told her I was a painter, she was overjoyed. But after a few weeks she began to wonder why I worked with so much Uno emulsion and Dulux undercoat, and ladders, and why she could not visit my "studio". It finally dawned on me that Svetlana thought I was an artist rather than a painter, but being a little afraid of her reaction, I kept the pretence up for some weeks.
When I finally admitted the truth, Svetlana really only stayed on in the flat because she had nowhere else to go. She had little interest in my argument that in my own way I too was an artist. The distinction was pretty clear in Uzbekistan, it seemed. Artists were highly rewarded there, and even the housepainters earned more (and had higher social standing) than freelance painters in London in the 1950s.
I was also, however, a perfectionist. The more I heard of Svetlana's lengthy and ongoing sittings with Euan Uglow, the more I admired the man and his methods.
I resolved then not to rush the painting job. I embarked at first on a rigorous observation of the subject matter, namely the four walls of our small double bedsitter. This took about three and a half months. It was quite exhausting.
Svetlana however was not pleased. She felt I could have had the entire job finished, with three coats of paint, in about five days. Svetlana went back to Euan. I began a rigorous observation of the ceiling. The months passed.
One day Svetlana asked me what the hell I was up to (her command of rather coarse English had improved dramatically). I replied that my painting method - ordered, purposeful and concentrated, would eventually become part of the content of the image to be created, and that paradoxically (if all went well), the effect would be animating.
Svetlana went out on her own - "for a pizza, and a goddam break". I got up on a ladder and began to mark out the ceiling in squares, following painstaking methods similar (I hoped) to those of Euan Uglow.
Svetlana's cycle of personal events speeded up. She left me permanently. She met someone else. She got married. She got divorced. The painting of the picture was finished. The painting of the flat wasn't. It may well be still the way it was, the lines marked out, the paint cans waiting, and perfection still beckoning, the way it does.
Times Square will next appear on September 11th