Extract from Craigie Aitchison
A Life in Colour
Chapter 2
When Craigie arrived at the Slade in October 1952 with his dog Somerset in tow, the first person he met, sitting outside, was Victor Willing. ‘And I thought, “Oh, this is a marvellous place, better than the law courts,” and Vic said, “Oh, there’s a man in the basement looks after the dogs, so take the doggie down.” And I took the dog down and I got this guy, and he said, “Who the hell told you to bring a dog down here?”’ He took it as ‘perfectly normal that they should have someone who looked after dogs’, his friend, art critic John McEwan noted.
This was just the first of Craigie’s tentative steps into a very unfamiliar world. At twenty-six, he was mixing with some students who had already studied art for years and others whose studies had been interrupted by wartime service. It was a stimulating atmosphere: ‘Because they were older, they knew where they were going and had a terrific sense of their direction and what they wanted to do, which was infectious,’ fellow student Jean Sturgis remembers. Craigie inched his way towards friendships. Susan Campbell ‘saw this dog and this extraordinary figure attached to one another by a long string, and I thought, “He’s got to be nice if he brings his dog to the Slade.” He was terribly shy. He had a large head for his body. He was physically unusual. And he always walked in a funny way, he walked lopsided.’ He was affectionately nicknamed ‘Fred’ – after Fred Astaire, ‘because I was so good at dancing’, Craigie declared, though another friend, Susan Ward, thinks Euan Uglow called him that because he would ‘waltz’ into one of the painting rooms, and he always seemed to be fidgeting on his feet.
Jean Sturgis thought him ‘quite special’, with ‘that rather high-pitched voice. Whatever he said was fascinating to me. He didn’t really have conversation. Everything he said was coming from somewhere rather unusual and unexpected.’ Craigie ‘stood out’ for Philip Sutton ‘because he was completely different from anyone else. He lived in a world of his own, unconnected to the real world, where he made the rules. Most people live by the rules they find lying around. He was sharp as a razor blade. He could sort out fake people and he took umbrage if he thought people were “putting it on”.’ Susan Campbell was the first person to invite him to a party – in her studio, which was a garden shed behind some terraced houses off the Euston Road. ‘He came with Somerset. Because he was so incredibly nice and charming and amusing, everybody became friends of his.’
As a paying rather than a diploma student, he could choose his courses. He avoided Perspective and Anatomy: ‘If I’d done that I would have been so worried about it I wouldn’t be able to paint.’ By the end of the first term he was going in every day. ‘The porter was very efficient and he said to me, “Aren’t you part-time? You can’t come in every day like this!”’ Craigie reported to Andrew Lambirth. To study full-time he had to submit work he’d done since school. ‘I rushed back to the rooms I was in and for three weeks I did some pictures. Then I got taken on full-time.’ One was Etruscan Pot Still-Life, which he copied in the British Museum.
He often found fellow students, like Tony Pacitti and Vic Willing, as helpful as staff. Euan Uglow and Myles Murphy became lifelong friends though he was awed by them at first. Euan had previously studied at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts and was the protégé of William Coldstream, the Slade’s Principal and Professor of Fine Art. ‘He and Myles were the stars of the school. I wouldn't dream of speaking to them,’ Craigie recalled ‘Euan was far too grand to speak to somebody new like me. He was nearly the Establishment and Coldstream’s pet.’ Craigie observed them from a distance. The ice was broken when one day he climbed to the top deck of the number 14 bus on the Tottenham Court Road, which was empty but for Uglow and Myles. Uglow spoke first.
From the outset Craigie was seen as an original and highly individual talent. He benefited from the Slade’s dual ethos – the mastery of traditional academic drawing discipline combined with an openness to progressive ideas. William Coldstream had been an official war artist in Egypt and Italy and in the 1930s worked with John Grierson in the GPO Film Unit. He had an egalitarian view of the role of the artist in society and was inclined to find talent in unexpected places, which meant there was an enormous variety of people at the Slade from different backgrounds. ‘He saw creativity in all sorts of different styles and types of work,’ says Jean Sturgis. ‘He went by instinct,’ Susan Campbell adds. ‘If they hadn’t done three years at another college or School Certificates, he’d just say, “Oh, all right”,’ Craigie’s presence there owed much to Coldstream’s sympathetic support.
Craigie was learning very fast and finding his own style, or as Euan explained: ‘He has found his own way to what he knew.’ Pencil drawing didn’t work as well for him as paint, and Myles Murphy, seeing this, encouraged him to draw only with paint, even in preparatory stages. ‘I was frightened to use the paint, so I used a pencil to draw the profile on the canvas,’ Craigie said. ‘But the pencil line spoilt it, I’m not a line person. I had to evolve the method of itching [the paint] to the edge and finally drawing the edge with a small knife. Susan Campbell sympathised: ‘I don’t think he liked drawing, but he had this eye. He could see things and translate them. It was when he started painting that everybody held their breath, because it was so amazing, so uniquely him, from the word go.’
It was sometimes hard going, however. When somebody at the Slade said ‘that I was no good because I couldn’t do portraits, only still-lifes’, he was ‘sparked off’ to do portraits, he recalled. ‘I was frightened out of the Life Room by [tutor] Monnington because he didn’t like my drawings, so I thought I couldn’t do people. But I was provoked to find out.’ Coldstream had a room where five specially selected students, including Euan and Myles, worked with a model for six weeks (poses were normally two weeks) using the process of objective appraisal and very precise measuring techniques for which the Slade and Coldstream became renowned. Craigie asked to be included and was allowed in for the next sitting. Euan and Nathalie Dower had already decided on the pose – ‘a model on a long couch, and I just couldn’t do that,’ Craigie said. Euan was not prepared to discuss it, so Craigie left. Two months later, when Euan had gone to Spain on a scholarship, Craigie got into the Life Room and was able to choose the pose – ‘and that was where I learnt how to try to paint people,’ he said.
Chapter 5
By the early 1980s Craigie had transformed 32 St Mary’s Gardens from the ‘dark, almost gloomy’ place stuffed with objects ‘that had obviously come from a far grander house’, which Graham Snow visited in the 1960s, to a house in his own image with the French furniture ‘restored to its garish, gilded glory’, the family paintings sold, and everywhere the unexpected, whimsical objects which caught his interest and fired his imagination. The ‘unpretentious decoration’, with some walls papered crimson or sugar pink, others in pre-war floral prints from Coles, was ‘outside time or fashion’, John McEwan noted on a 1985 visit. In several burglaries he had lost most of the family heirlooms, which upset him, but the collection was replenished. Friends loved to bring him presents.
In his choice of objects, Craigie made no distinction between cheap or valuable, modest or exotic: ‘How helpful they were to him, those kitsch objects. I never understood them for a long time,’ Anthony Fry comments. ‘They could be two birds from a birthday card and he’d use those birds in a completely original way, he’d make them into something else.’ Graham Snow was amazed to find that his Nativity paintings ‘were copied from a cheap plastic snow globe with only a nod to Fra Angelico’. The objects tended to be ‘unashamedly unsophisticated’, Patrick Kinmonth notes. ‘He wanted to show that it’s not the grandeur of an object that makes it suitable as a subject for painting. Sophistication was a term of abuse for Craigie.’
Though the objects covered every surface and wall of the house, it was an ordered arrangement with everything in its place, an organic manifestation of his inner life. ‘To a lot of people it seemed like clutter,’ Francis Fry reflects, but his interior life was ordered: ‘He had a place of absolute calm inside. He was very precise. He was precisely formed on the inside.’
His still-lifes were painted from observation of objects around him. Liquorice Allsorts Still-Life (1980), one of his most unlikely and mundane subjects, is among the most abstract – a bag of sweets in a cellophane packet tied with red. It forms a witty, tight composition of shapes and colours. The seemingly floating form with its contoured white outline is anchored by the central stripe of pink echoing the horizon stripe along the upper edge. The palette almost exactly replicates that of his earlier Model in a Black Hat, from 1977.
He moved further towards abstraction in the evocative precision and simplicity of Lemon and Jar Still-Life (1981), which won the first £5,000 Johnson’s Wax Prize for the most outstanding painting at the 1982 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. He was invited to the ceremony, but didn’t want to go – ‘I’m not going. I won’t go,’ he told Alex. But they went, ‘and there was this stage you had to go up to. And Craigie tried to get up on the stage and fell over immediately, because his legs didn’t work. And then he said, “I’m going to go home and polish all my furniture with Johnson’s Wax.” The timing was beyond anything. It brought the house down.’
The decision was controversial, but the Daily Mail’s headline – ‘The Winner Is a Lemon’ – and the Daily Telegraph’s ‘Joy, Perplexity and Disgust at Art Rummage’ were countered by Bridget Riley of the judging panel: ‘I voted for it because of its serenity, calm and balance.’