Craigie Aitchison

Continuing the trip down memory lane prompted by Howard Hodgkin’s appearance in the sequence yesterday we arrive today at Craigie Aitchison’s magnificent crucifixion from 1979, a painting that was the centrepiece of our exhibition of Craigie’s work in the summer 2003 and which now belongs to the National Galleries of Scotland.

Craigie was another very important figure in the very early days of the gallery – he took part in our opening exhibition in July 1998, alongside Ian Hamilton Finlay, Margaret Mellis and Callum Innes as one of a group of artists from Scotland whose reputations had been forged further afield, their work seldom seen on home soil.

Craigie was especially unconvinced by our arguments about why he should show his work in Edinburgh – his relationship with the place being one of unforgiving animosity forged by the deeply conservative circumstances of his childhood and what he still felt, half a century later, as the dismissal and disapproval of ‘Edinburgh folk’. The process of persuasion took a lot of afternoons at the wrong end of a vodka bottle before he agreed to take part in our first exhibition, but over the time we worked together, until his death in 2009, we were proud to play a small part in rehabilitating his relationship with the country of his birth.