Speaking in relation to Passionate Proportion, Euan Uglow said: ‘It’s to do with very simple structure, and it seemed to be an important thing for me to make some kind of order out of chaos.’ The title of the painting provides an insight into a foundational contradiction in Uglow’s practice, and many of his pictures contain an unresolved tension between precision, measurement and austere formality, on one hand, and ‘passion’, playfulness and sensual pleasure, on the other. In the artist’s own account, ‘Passionate Proportion should be like electric currents coming from those four cubes and making that pot in the middle.’

Much as still-life painters in seventeenth-century Holland exploited the table edge as a dramatic compositional element, precariously projecting objects beyond the front edge of the table, Euan Uglow also sought to activate the framing structures of his still-life compositions. In Passionate Proportion, the full extent of the table surface is included: all four corners and the legs beneath are visible. The effect is to destabilise the horizon line formed by the furthermost edge of the table, which is so often treated (in the work of both Uglow and many others) like the infinite horizon in a landscape. In consequence, the table has a more tangibly physical relationship to the back wall before which it stands. This is further developed by the detailed treatment of the back wall: it is lively with variations of tone, which variously indicate discolouring on the wall, the play of light across uneven patches, and even the structure of brick courses that seems to grin through; this last creates a step-like pattern in places that can be observed in other paintings by Uglow of the fifties, sixties and seventies.

The early sixties were a formative period in Uglow’s career. A step change took place in his work at this time as he began to handle the basic elements of picture-making critically, rather than simply assuming them to be a necessary part of painting. He developed a sensitivity to the spatial relationship between a subject and the eye of the artist, and the construction of three dimensions on the flat surface of the picture plane. The critic Richard Kendall argued that Passionate Proportion was ‘one of the first of these pictures’ in which Uglow was ‘engaged with a new, and perhaps less polite, set of pictorial challenges.’ In retrospect, Passionate Proportion might be regarded as a seminal painting in Uglow’s career because it established so many of the features that came to define his subsequent still-life work. As Kendall summarised, writing in 1991, ‘[t]his sense of the painting as a “made” object, both in its surface activity and the artificiality of its arrangement, is increasingly apparent as Uglow’s career progresses.’

Passionate Proportion was constructed using meticulously researched single-point perspective. The measuring marks, especially visible along the front edge of the table top, are remainders from a painstaking sequence of measurements, which helped Uglow to plot the exact position of the objects both in relation to the monocular viewpoint of the painter and to each other when translated onto the flat tableau of the canvas. The critic William Packer explained in 1974 that ‘the use of registration marks [was] to establish constant relationships between eye and object, and to confirm internal relationships across the picture-plane.’ This approach to picture-making suggests that Uglow was reacting against the archetypal cubist picture (epitomised by certain works of Braque, Picasso, Ben Nicholson), in which multi-point perspective and arbitrary deconstructions of the subject avoided the hard problem of representation (i.e. re-creating an object within the limits of a flat image). Speaking in 1993, Uglow referred to his still-life painting The Three Graces (1979–81) as ‘a kind of cubist picture’. It was an exception in his output, and he went on to state definitively: ‘I want to paint one image, not several.‘

Some areas of the paint surface in Passionate Proportion are either unresolved or unpainted, most visibly at the upper left-hand corner where Uglow added a few semi-legible notes to himself: ‘diff[erent] colour for each […] yellow […] Thurs 12’. The critic William Packer argued that in Uglow’s practice, ‘nothing is ever finished.’ He attributed this fact to the artist’s process-driven approach, in which ‘the paintings reach a point where they may be left […], so work on them stops […]. The activity is its own justification, not merely the means of producing a commodity, Art.’ In 1993, Andrew Lambirth posed to Uglow the question of whether Passionate Proportion was finished. The artist replied: ‘I didn’t think that I could do any more to it. It would have seemed like filling in.’

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The following entry about Passionate Proportion, written by Catherine Lampert, was published in the catalogue raisonné of Euan Uglow's paintings:

Characteristically, Uglow demystified the subject: 'Electricity – if you get two arcs they throw electricity across and get light. You have four cubes and they are giving off energy and you get a pot. I had two pots – the coffee survived and the flour didn't.' (EU/CL, 21 May 2000). […] Rare among Uglow’s paintings for the lack of animal or vegetable presence of any kind, Passionate Proportion offers a focused, uncluttered glimpse of another aspect of his art—the plotting of visual dynamics. It also recalls Uglow’s lifelong admiration for certain abstract painters, from the curve-dominated abstractions of Victor Pasmore to the taut, energetic grids of Piet Mondrian.