Propeller was painted at night. The model is brilliantly illuminated by harsh electric light overhead, the highlight of which is focused around her breasts. The painting was modelled for by a student at the Slade School of Fine Art called Lindsay Adlam. Her arms are raised and pulled back to support her head, and her left elbow casts a shadow beyond the edge of the platform. The composition is mapped onto the support with exact precision, and Uglow commented of Propeller to the critic Martin Gayford that ‘unless the centre line [of the painting] is through her bosom, one might as well not paint’. The artificial light is responsible for the predominant warm, ochreous hues in the painting; Uglow painted the work with only yellow ochre, black and white. Propeller belongs together with several other nude paintings of similar sizes and colour schemes, which were similarly shown in Browse & Darby’s Night Paintings exhibition after Uglow’s death. They include Jana (1996–97), Nuria (1998–2000) and Double Square (1999–2000).

Owing to the rotundity of Uglow’s propeller form, he found it necessary to plot a large number of arcs at the surface of the painting using a pencil and compass. He commented to Peter Stiles, ‘My picture Propeller […] is stuck with thousands of holes; if I’d been doing it on canvas it would have fallen to bits’. (The painting was painted on canvas laid on board.) These pinholes are only visible upon close inspection, and they are concentrated almost exclusively on the figure. There is a particular concentration around the face. The figure is modelled starkly in highlights and shadows, with few mid-tones. The details of the face and the outlines of the silhouette were painted cleanly in single outlines of yellow ochre.

When Propeller was exhibited in Euan Uglow: Night Paintings in 2001, the critic Richard Kendall suggested that the painting’s title spoke of Uglow’s ‘lifelong delight in verbal and visual mischief’. With demure humour, Uglow comfortably transposed the erotic imagery of a contorted young woman and likened her attitude to the shape of a propeller blade, the means of propulsion for a ship or an aeroplane. The propeller is defined by motion, while Uglow’s model is still; the woman’s body is warm, the propeller is metal. Yet both a propeller and the young woman, in the painter’s imagination, are definite physical shapes. Uglow’s chosen arrangement of the model was presumably intended to configure her arms and legs as blades of the propeller.

However, Uglow himself gave a more austere explanation and implied that the original idea for the painting was inseparable from the title. Shortly before his death in 2000, he spoke to Catherine Lampert about his intention for Propeller:

"I was trying to make a form like a propeller (two-bladed, or a fan). Just think of it as a propeller: here is a blade, here is a hole, and this is sticking this way, and this, this way, as it would be going through water."

While painting, he explained, the need arose to distort the proportions of the model. If single-point perspective was used with strictly accurate foreshortenings of the figure, the pose and angle of vision would have led to an unsightly and disharmonious composition in which the left leg was unusually small in relation to the head and trunk. Lampert explained that ‘Uglow established another scale, isolating a two-foot portion’; and as Uglow said to her, he ‘then divided that by two foot, so it has some order’.

According to the artist’s own blue-edged label affixed to the reverse of the painting, Propeller was dated 1994–96. These were the dates given it when first exhibited by Browse & Darby in 1997. It is inaccurately dated 1994–95 in Catherine Lampert’s complete catalogue of the Uglow’s paintings.