Alistair Crawford Hon RE

Born January, 1945

Made Honorary RE in 2000

Died on October 2, 2025

Professor Alistair Crawford was a painter-printmaker who transformed the visual arts in Wales. Born in the northeastern town of Fraserburgh, his father fished for herring along the North Sea coast. They lived on the top floor of a three-story tenement above a Butchers shop. “At night you could sometimes hear the rats behind the walls scurrying about so we would bang on the wall to shut them up.”

At Fraserburgh Academy, art teacher Bob Duthie became a guiding influence which led to Alistair gaining a place to study at Glasgow School of Art in 1962. There he came under the spell of the pioneering textile designer Bob Stewart (1924-1995) who considered him one of his most promising students. Alistair graduated with a Diploma of Art in Printed Textiles in 1966.

Arriving in January 1974 to take up a lectureship at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, the landscape was reassuringly familiar. The lines of the hillsides and the sparse houses with their Monday washing hanging outside made him feel as if he were coming home to his native Aberdeenshire. Here was a landscape that resonated with him as an artist.

As a painter-printmaker, he exhibited in London, Italy, Sardegna and the USA. With 42 solo shows and contributions to over 200 selected exhibitions his output was impressive. He showed at the Curwen Gallery, Printworks Gallery, Chicago and MOMA Machynlleth. He loved the Greek Islands and Italy, but the subject he captured best was the landscape of mid-Wales which he recorded with the penetrating gaze of an outsider. A quiet atmosphere of melancholy haunts much of this work, whether the subject is a solitary cottage, deserted seafront or a red kite flying home. Alistair’s work has an abstract quality of flatness that comes from his training in design. “For me painting is also a design activity. A painting must be designed. I find many painters have not a clue what that means.”

Alistair Crawford received official recognition in 1985 when he was awarded the Royal National Eisteddfod of Wales Gold Medal in Fine Art – the first time such a prize had been awarded to a printmaker. Further recognition followed in 1993 with election to the Royal Cambrian Academy, and in 2000 he was elected an honorary member of the RE in recognition of services to the art of printmaking.

In 2010, after 36 years in Wales, Alistair moved to Great Cornard on the Suffolk and Essex borders where Gainsborough had painted centuries before. It gave him great satisfaction to know that his prints were in the British Museum alongside the work of J.M.W. Turner. The three-storey house which he shared with his wife Joan, already filled with books and paintings became a magpie’s nest of Russian ceramics, glass, perfume bottles, art deco pewter and plate and icons on every shelf.

Simon Pierse RWS