Exhibitions 2
Craigie Aitchison (Timothy Taylor Gallery, 1 Bruton Place, W1 and Waddington Galleries, 34 Cork Street, Wl, till 19 December)
Poet of colour
Andrew Lambirth Craigie Aitchison, one of our most dis- tinguished painters and undoubtedly our greatest living poet of colour, has been taken up by two of London's leading com- mercial art galleries. This new move, with attendant plans to promote Aitchison's work in America, will help to bring this unique artist's vision to a yet wider public. Aitchison is so popular in England that no dealer or agent has bothered to promote his work abroad, since all of his relatively small output is easily sold here. Thus he is not as well known internationally as he might be; would not his delicate still-life arrangements be much admired in Japan, for instance? It's high time his work was shown around the world.
As you enter the Timothy Taylor Gallery (which incidentally now occupies the premises of the old Beaux Arts Gallery, 'Italian Easter Egg', 1997-98 where Helen Lessore first showed Aitchi- son in 1959), the first thing to strike you is the blue-eyed Christ with wild auburn hair in 'Religious Painting'. This is a close-up head, unusual in Aitchison's religious pic- tures, and cut from a much larger canvas, the rest of which was destroyed. Aitchison is meticulous about 'getting it right' — about resolving the image to his satisfac- tion in terms of form and content — and will spend months reworking his already scrubbed thin paint surfaces. The pictures may look effortless, but years of painstak- ing labour, of trial and error and experi- ment, of destroying unsuccessful paintings, lie behind the apparent assurance of today. Next to the blue-eyed Christ is a beautiful little purple 'Crucifixion with Dog', fol- lowed by two still-lifes of a single lily in a vase, one on electric blue, the other on a pink ground.
Thus three of the mainstays of Aitchi- son's work are at once established — the religious paintings, the images of animals (particularly his beloved Bedlington terri- ers) and the still-lifes. The fourth compo- nent is to be found on the opposite wall of the main room — portraits. Aitchison likes to paint black people because of the way other colours sing against black skin. He paints tough, uncompromising portraits which do not seek to flatter. They are sim- ply about what Aitchison sees and his attempt to convey that information to the viewer. If the results are beautiful, this is almost beside the point; Aitchison has sought out character and appearance rather than attractiveness.
Elsewhere in this room hangs an earlier work, a 'Crucifixion' from 1984-86, which holds its own very well amidst all this recent work, and particularly against a fine new 'Crucifixion' featuring another armless Christ with red bird, green bird and dog in attendance. A lively little banded painting of 'Holy Island' hangs next to it, in dramat- ic counterpoint to a large landscape nearby of the same subject. On the opposite wall is a stunning and inspired piece of hanging: a still-life of an anemone is flanked on either side by an Italian Easter egg in a cocoon of coloured cellophane, one predominantly green, the other pink. Here Aitchison's genius as a colourist can be seen to best advantage: the daring colour combinations, the subtlety of their execution, and the inner light which floods the compositions. In these matters, Aitchison is peerless. Regard the cerulean blue rabbit on the permanent rose cellophane placed against a cadmium red ground; or the trio of lumi- nous green grapes foregrounding the back- ing monastral blue of the 'Anemone Still-Life'; not to mention the magnificent jade Easter egg. The display at Waddington's corner gallery has altogether a more retrospective feel. Paintings have been borrowed back from private collections and include such key early works as the dark and palely glowing 'Swan Vestas Still-Life' from 1956. This picture marked a watershed for Aitchison, the point at which he realised that dark colours could be equally as 'glam- orous' as bright, and when the influence of the Italian greats such as Giotto and Piero della Francesca first really made itself felt. Among the other pictures here is a serene early portrait, 'Gorgeous Macaulay' from 1963, a spare and mysterious landscape fragment 'Green Butterfly, Red Tree' (1992), and a lovely little recent wedgy landscape with telegraph pole and seagulls.
Craigie Aitchison is an artist of great pic- torial sophistication. He can create forms which, although they appear to be simple, are endowed with a poetic or spiritual pres- ence which defies mere verbal description. It is a mistake to think his art easy or naive, yet he himself has no wish to over-compli- cate either his meaning or his motivation.
1;,The splendour of Craigie Aitchison's work
as meditative but also sensual: he unites the
celestial and the mundane in a celebration r o generous it can touch the most misan- hropic with its appeal.
Previous page
