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14/10/03
Craigie Aitchison
Royal Academy of Arts, Sackler
Gallery, London
9 October–9 November 2003.
Two important exhibitions overlapped recently
in England: the first was in Kendal, in the English Lake District,
and the second at the Royal Academy in London. They serve to remind
us of the silent strengths of a purely British art, indeed one might
justifiably say, Scottish art. The first outstanding painter was
Euan Uglow, who had, by the time of his death from cancer in 2000,
built up a solid constituency of supporters. His fans included former
Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine, and the ubiquitous Blairs, despite
the fact that Uglow was producing only two paintings per year latterly.
The second figure was Craigie Aitchison, who came from an Edinburgh
based legal background. Aitchison specialised in the traditional
areas of portraiture, landscape, and still life. He was elected
a Royal Academician in 1988. His simple, economical, yet profoundly
poetical compositions share with Uglow a soothing peacefulness,
a palpable mood of silent contemplation. The more recent 'crucific'
paintings convey a singular individualism that is moving in its
very simplicity. The Isle of Arran features heavily in his work,
as he recomposes the childhood holiday photographs of the 1930s.
This landform is again recomposed for the four panels executed
for the chapel of St Margaret at Truro cathedral in Cornwall.
An important catalyst in this direction was Aitchison's Italian
Government scholarship of 2000. From this stint at Montecastelli
has emerged a powerful series of landscape paintings, thinly painted
yet movingly emotive of place, of garden landscape. A distant,
elevated crucifix of Montencastelli is introduced here via a series
of figments; birds, plus a smaller, domestically scaled crucifix,
a symbolic bird, a white horse, birds on a lake, vying with the
moon (or possibly sun) set in the same picture frame. The portraits
shown adopt for the most part the same conventional pose and expression,
arms loosely folded, eyes glancing off to the right.
Aitchison's Royal Academy show is clearly a milestone for
this painter, and has been meticulously curated and hung in Norman
Foster's Sackler Galleries, where the scale is perfect for
Aitchison's work. Its distillation of discreet images from everyday
life is presented in a mode where elimination of the non-essential
offers an unwritten code. Perhaps it is in Uglow's fastidious
litany that the dynamic of form binds us in, while Aitchison provides
us with escape routes outwards.
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