John Ronald Craigie Aitchison CBE RSA RA was a Scottish painter. He was best known for his many paintings of the Crucifixion, one of which hangs behind the altar in the chapter house of Liverpool Cathedral, Italian landscapes, and portraits (mainly of black men, or of dogs). His simple style with bright, childlike colours defied description, and was compared to the Scottish Colourists, primitivists or naive artists
Craige Aitchison CBE RA.
John Ronald Craigie Aitchison CBE RSA RA (January 1926 – December 2009) was a Scottish painter. Aitchison studied at the Slade School of Fine Art 1952-4, having decided against a career in law. In 1955, he received a British Council and Italian government scholarship to study in Italy, where the different light and landscape made a marked impression on his work. Aitchison’s work took on a strong pastel colouring and he adopted a few simple shapes, such as a figure, a tree or a bird, which were to be his trade marks. His apparently simple pictures can be comical or sad, but are always original. He had a series of shows at the Beaux Arts Gallery, 1954-64 and also showed with LG, Compass Gallery in Glasgow, Knoedler & Co.
Notable exhibitions were held at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (1979) and at the Serpentine Gallery in 1981, with a retrospective at Harewood House, 1994 and a major show at the Gallery of Modern Art Glasgow, 1996. Hall was made an RA in 1988 and recently made CBE.