Aitchison, Craigie

From: A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art | Date: 1999 | Author: | Copyright information

Aitchison, Craigie (1926– ). British painter, born in Edinburgh. He studied at the Slade School, 1952–4, and has spent most of his life in London, but he has not forgotten his Scottish roots and the Isle of Arran has inspired some of his best landscape paintings. As well as landscapes, he paints portraits, still-lifes, animals, and religious subjects. His style is flat (sometimes with an almost heraldic simplicity of image) and whimsical; admirers find it luminous and poetic, detractors find it twee and poorly drawn. Aitchison himself writes: ‘My pictures are always of something; they're not just “planes of colour” or anything posh like that. When I do a still-life or a portrait, I place the object or the person in front of the colour that is to appear in the picture. It may take hours of fiddling about with different backdrops of paper or cloth to get the colour right. You can't get the composition right if the colour's wrong. I suppose what most irritates me is if someone says I'm a “naive” painter.’ Aitchison is a colourful character, a well-known figure in Soho.

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