Craigie Aitchison

Few works in twentieth-century British art possess the quality of suspended silence that Craigie Aitchison consistently achieved in his works of art. In Canaries on a Tree, small yellow birds rest on the lean, almost calligraphic branches of a bare tree — their forms vivid against a luminous, colour-saturated ground that seems lit from within. The composition strips the natural world to its essence: no superfluous detail, only the charged presence of birds at rest, and the space around them.

This limited-edition screenprint, hand-signed by the artist, was issued in 2003, the same year that the Royal Academy of Arts, London, mounted a major retrospective of Aitchison’s work at Norman Foster's Sackler Galleries, cementing his reputation as one of the defining figures of Modern British art. Aitchison (1926–2009) trained at the Slade School of Fine Art alongside Paula Rego and Euan Uglow, won the inaugural Jerwood Painting Prize in 1994, and was appointed CBE in 1999 for his contribution to British art. His work is held in the permanent collections of Tate, the Government Art Collection, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

Birds were among the most recurrent and emotionally freighted motifs in Aitchison's practice — intimate presences set within near-abstract fields of colour that owe as much to the luminosity of Italian Renaissance altarpieces, encountered on his British Council scholarship to Rome in 1955, as to any contemporary tradition. The canaries here are at once precisely observed and weightless, alive with the quiet spiritual intensity that made Aitchison’s vision wholly unlike anyone else working in Britain at the time.

Collectors seeking to acquire a signed, limited-edition work by Modern British artists are invited to do so through Dellasposa Gallery, Kensington, London.