Craigie Aitchison was one of the most original British artists of his generation whose success was underpinned by rigorous observation and a painter’s sensitivity to surface texture. The use of saturated mineral colouring in his work betrays a mixture of vision, a view of life beyond appearances, and craftsman-like skill, forging an intoxicating alchemy of yellow and cerulean, umber and viridian. In Aitchison’s paintings the apparent simplicity of the work conceals many difficult, calculated creative acts.

 

The use of vivid colour in Aitchison’s work is guileless, free of pretext and without a codified meaning. In his view of art, there was a close relationship between what he called ‘posh paint’ – the use of thick paint and textured brushwork – and pretentiousness. He was vehemently, sometimes angrily critical of pretentiousness in art and he regularly chastised those artists he thought guilty of using ‘posh paint’, such as Francis Bacon or Howard Hodgkin. A dislike of pretension was complemented in Aitchison’s work by allusions to ‘low’ culture, gaudy colouring, and unerring thinness of paint – a rejection of the virtuosic bravado which he perceived in some of his contemporaries.