This daisy was taken back to Turnchapel Mews by Uglow from a party at Lord and Lady Irvine’s and placed in a sauce bottle affixed to the wall. The daisy, a recurring motif seen earlier in Daisy and Nudes, c. 1964-70, and later in Daisy Triptych, 1991, became for Uglow a talismanic if unassuming subject through which to pursue intellectual and practical challenges. With Daisy, Uglow revives vexing distortions specifically relating to the glass bottle filled with water that holds the perfectly blooming daisy in front of the cornflower blue wall. The elusive materiality and volatile reflective qualities of water and glass thwart the intersection of perception and logic, challenging Uglow’s project to get things ‘right’ in paint. Some problems are solved without too much difficulty such as the disruption of the pure line of the daisy stem when entering water. Others prove more complex: modulations of blue, touches of white suggesting reflection, and outlines in white and green are all utilised by Uglow to present the bottle in three-dimensions whilst simultaneously conveying the different manifestations of transparency in solid glass and liquid water. The proposition unravels at the neck of the bottle as Uglow evidently struggles to position the stem atop the body of the bottle at the correct depth. An understanding of spatial relationships is fleetingly tangible. The fresco-like blue of the background, a flat decoratively smooth surface in a hue inspiring near-devotional meditative absorption, contrasts with the extreme foreshortening of daisy petals. Tonal patterns and aspirations to solidity both have their part to play in Uglow’s dual quest to rival and to question the external world. Uglow transformed a humble daisy into a provocation, a troubling thorn to lucid perceptual understanding.