Craigie Aitchison

Craigie Aitchison CBE RA (1926–2009) is one of the most distinct voices in the Modern British tradition. A painter who studied at the Slade School of Fine Art alongside Michael Andrews and Paula Rego, and whose work entered the permanent collections of Tate, the National Galleries of Scotland, and the National Museum of Wales. His practice resists categorisation: though his bold, luminous colour fields appear naive in style, Aitchison insisted on a sensibility rooted in the Renaissance colourists he encountered on a formative British Council scholarship to Rome in 1955.

In this work, Indian Print I, Aitchison transposes his philosophy of colour into print. The screenprint process rewards and amplifies his method whereby the compressed, near-abstract figure floats within a field of warm, unmodulated island and sea of colour, the composition pared to its irreducible essence. Art critic Andrew Gibbon Williams wrote of Aitchison that “superficial simplicity results from the paring away of inessential elements,” and this work demonstrates precisely that discipline.

The Indian Print series — of which this is the first — was produced in a limited edition, signed by the artist, and carries all of Aitchison’s painterly intelligence in an accessible format for collectors building a considered collection of Modern British art.