The extraordinary paintings of Craigie Aitchison

One of the most extraordinary paintings in the exhibition of work by Craigie Aitchison at Piano Nobile (96–129 Portland Road, W11) is entitled ‘Georgeous Macauley in Blue against a Red Background’ (1968). It depicts the sitter, a Nigerian who was Aitchison’s favourite model of the 1960s and ’70s, wearing a peaked cap and double-breasted jacket. The catalogue quotes a reminiscence by the artist which provides a partial explanation of the headgear. ‘He wanted to be a traffic warden, and I said, “Why do you want to go about in the rain doing that?” And he said, “Because you get a uniform.”’

The art and life of Aitchison (1926–2009) were all like that: perfectly logical and at a unexpected tangent from normality. Some of his paintings could pass for colour-field abstraction of the kind produced by artists such as Barnett Newman. In this picture the wonderfully named Georgeous Macauley is placed against a field of deep scarlet.